Ian Hacking Quotes
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One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.
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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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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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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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Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
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Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.
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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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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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When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.
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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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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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Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.
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Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
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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
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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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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.