Ian Hacking

“Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and...”

“The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.”

“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...”

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

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

“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 pa...”

“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 revo...”

“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 confront...”

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

“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 correspond...”

“I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'”

“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 p...”

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

“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.”

“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...”

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

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

“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...”

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

“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 n...”