Ian Hacking Quotes

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

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

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

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 have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

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

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

Acceptance means commitment, among other things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.