Ian Hacking Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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

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

Ian Hacking
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.

Ian Hacking
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.

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

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

Ian Hacking
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.

Ian Hacking
Now how does one alter the charge on the niobium ball? "Well at that stage," said my friend, "we spray it with positrons to increase the charge or with electrons to decrease the charge." From that day forth I've been a scientific realist. So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.

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

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

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

Ian Hacking
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
Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory.

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

Ian Hacking
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
Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

Ian Hacking
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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

Ian Hacking
To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.

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

Ian Hacking
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