Ian Hacking Quotes
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In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.
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We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.
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Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
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Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.
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The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.
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All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
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The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school.
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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.
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I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.
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The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.
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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.
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If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
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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.
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Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.
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It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.
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Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
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Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
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Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.
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One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing.
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Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.
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Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.
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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.
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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.
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When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.