List of Ian Hacking Quotes

Acceptance Means Commitment, Among Other Things.

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.

In Each Case You Settle On An Act. Doing Nothing At All Counts As An Act.

When Land And Its Tillage Are The Basis Of Taxation, One Need Not Care Exactly How Many People There Are.

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.

If You Were Just Intent On Killing People You Could Do Better With A Bomb Made Of Agricultural Fertiliser.

By Legend And Perhaps By Nature Philosophers Are More Accustomed To The Armchair Than The Workbench.

Many Modern Philosophers Claim That Probability Is Relation Between An Hypothesis And The Evidence For It.

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.

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.

Molecular Biology Has Routinely Taken Problematic Things Under Its Wing Without Altering Core Ideas.

Statistics Began As The Systematic Study Of Quantitative Facts About The State.