Ian Hacking Quotes
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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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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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Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords.
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Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.
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One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.
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The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that.
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Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.
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Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
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Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.
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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.
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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