Ian Hacking quotes

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself. (Ian Hacking)
There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside. View quote
Ian Hacking
Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance. View quote
Ian Hacking
Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction! View quote
Ian Hacking
Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory. View quote
Ian Hacking
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology. View quote
Ian Hacking
Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state. View quote
Ian Hacking
We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create. View quote
Ian Hacking
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it. View quote
Ian Hacking
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are. View quote
Ian Hacking
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas. (Ian Hacking)
Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything-and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance. View quote
Ian Hacking
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. View quote
Ian Hacking
Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. View quote
Ian Hacking
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser. View quote
Ian Hacking
Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption. View quote
Ian Hacking
To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough. View quote
Ian Hacking
Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory. View quote
Ian Hacking
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. View quote
Ian Hacking
I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.' View quote
Ian Hacking