Top 40 Ian Hacking Quotes

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.

It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.

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.

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.

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.

One of Kuhn’s marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

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.

It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.

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.

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

Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull.

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

Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.

The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

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.

It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

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

A ‘philosophical dictionary’ is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

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.

Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life.

If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code.

Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.

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.

Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, ‘power’ and ‘knowledge.’ As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ are to be something else.

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

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.

Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

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

I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’