Ian Hacking Quotes

When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.

Acceptance means commitment, among other things.

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

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.

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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.

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.

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'

I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.

Self knowledge is a virtue in its own right. We value the way in which people can fulfill their own natures by gaining an unsentimental self understanding. We think it is good to grow, for all our vices, into someone who is mature enough to face the past and the present, someone who understands how character, in its weaknesses as well as its strengths, is made of interlocking tendencies and gifts that have grown in the course of a life. The image of growth and maturing is Aristotelian rather than Kantian. These ancient values are ideals that none fully achieve, and yet they are modest, not seeking to find a meaning in life, but finding excellence in living and honoring life and its potentialities.

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.

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

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.