Ian Hacking famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Taken #Wings #Ideas
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Simplicity #Done #World
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

#Vocabulary #Ideas #Combination
Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.
-- Ian Hacking

#Ignorance #Arise #Fractions
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.
-- Ian Hacking

#Land #People #Needs
Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.
-- Ian Hacking

#Statistics #Systematic #Facts
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Adventure #Might #Theory
A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.
-- Ian Hacking

#Observation #Inconsistent #Generalization
Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!
-- Ian Hacking

#Problem #Century #Evidence
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
-- Ian Hacking

#Philosopher #Modern #Claims
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
-- Ian Hacking

#Opinion #Medieval #Companion
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Two #Way #Problem
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Curiosity #World #Natural
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Math #Science #House
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
-- Ian Hacking

#People #Bombs #Killing
The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
-- Ian Hacking

#Ideas #Paradox #Reactions
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Future #Cutting #Littles
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.
-- Ian Hacking

#Race #Realising #Humans

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