Ian Hacking - The Emergence of Probability

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

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

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

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
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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

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

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

Ian Hacking