76 Quotes by 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 school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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