Ian Hacking Quotes

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Ian Hacking

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 18, 1936

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.

Ian Hacking

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.

Ian Hacking

In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.

Ian Hacking

Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self.

Ian Hacking

Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.

Ian Hacking

We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.

Ian Hacking

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

Ian Hacking

The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.

Ian Hacking

Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications.

Ian Hacking

Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.

Ian Hacking

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

Ian Hacking

Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.

Ian Hacking

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

Ian Hacking

Great books are rare.

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

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.

Ian Hacking

The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.

Ian Hacking

The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun.

Ian Hacking

All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.

Ian Hacking

Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.

Ian Hacking