Ian Hacking Quotes
Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.
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.
Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!
The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.
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.
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
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.
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.
By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
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.
Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.