Ian Hacking Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

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.

Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.

Acceptance means commitment, among other things.

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.

In each case you settle on an act. Doing nothing at all counts as an act.

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

The important thing is to be able to understand anyone who has something useful to say. - There is a general moral here. Be very careful and very clear about what you say. But do not be dogmatic about your own language. Be prepared to express any careful thought in the language your audience will understand. And be prepared to learn from someone who talks a language with which you are not familiar.

The final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.

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.

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

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

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

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.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

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

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