Ian Hacking - Collected Quotes

"A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'." (Ian Hacking, "The Emergence Of Probability", 1975)

"Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it." (Ian Hacking, "The Emergence of Probability", 1975)

"Determinism was eroded during the nineteenth century and a space was cleared for autonomous laws of chance. The idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two transformations were parallel and fed into each other. Chance made the world seem less capricious; it was legitimated because it brought order out of chaos. The greater the level of indeterminism in our conception of the world and of people, the higher the expected level of control." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"Epistemology is the theory of knowledge and belief." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"Logic is the theory of inference and argument. For this purpose we use the deductive and often tautological unravelling of axioms provided by pure mathematics, but also, and for most practical affairs, we now employ- sometimes precisely, sometimes informally - the logic of statistical inference." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"Metaphysics is the science of the ultimate states of the universe." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"The systematic collection of data about people has affected not only the ways in which we conceive of a society, but also the ways in which we describe our neighbour. It has profoundly transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we think of ourselves." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"There is a seeming paradox: the more the indeterminism, the more the control. This is obvious in the physical sciences. Quantum physics takes for granted that nature is at bottom irreducibly stochastic. Precisely that discovery has immeasurably enhanced our ability to interfere with and alter the course of nature." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"I write of the taming of chance, that is, of the way in which apparently chance or irregular events have been brought under the control of natural or social law. The world became not more chancy, but far less so. Chance, which was once the superstition of the vulgar, became the centrepiece of natural and social science, or so genteel and rational people are led to believe." (Ian Hacking, "The Taming of Chance", 1990)

"The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea." (Ian Hacking, "An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic", 2001)