Ian Hacking Quotes
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As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.
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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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In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.
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The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.
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We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.
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Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
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It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action.
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The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.
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Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.
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Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!
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Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
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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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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.