Ian Hacking Quotes
Born: February 18, 1936
Ian Hacking, a Canadian philosopher of science, reshaped how we understand human action and the power of ideas. Though his academic work spanned statistics, language, and the mind, his most resonant insight is motivational: that we are not fixed entities but beings shaped by our own classifications and choices. Hacking’s philosophy of “making up people” reveals that labels can either cage or liberate us. His quotes inspire action by urging us to question inherited categories and to actively rewrite our own narratives. For those seeking transformation, Hacking’s wisdom is a call to embrace agency, reminding us that what we believe we can become is often what we truly become.
Ian Hacking Quotes (42)
"In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy."
— 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"Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— Ian Hacking"I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'"
— Ian Hacking"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"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"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."
— Ian Hacking"If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— 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"Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— Ian Hacking"Great books are rare."
— Ian Hacking"One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— Ian Hacking"One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered."
— Ian Hacking"Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past."
— Ian Hacking"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."
— 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"The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull."
— Ian Hacking"Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life."
— Ian Hacking"All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them."
— Ian Hacking"We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images."
— Ian Hacking"Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing."
— Ian Hacking"Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century."
— 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"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"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."
— Ian Hacking