Ian Hacking Quotes on Knowledge
Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability (1975), Representing and Intervening (1983), and The Social Construction of What? (1999) gave late twentieth-century philosophy of science one of its most influential historicist alternatives to the dominant analytical and Kuhnian frameworks. The central methodological commitment is that the categories through which the sciences organize their knowledge — probability, normal and pathological, the looping kinds of social classification — have specific historical conditions of emergence that the standard analytical accounts cannot accommodate without distortion, and the proper philosophical work is therefore the genealogical analysis of these conditions in concert with conceptual analysis. The framework, drawing on Foucault, Lakatos, and the broader history-of-science tradition, shaped contemporary engagement with the social construction of scientific objects, the philosophy of social science, and the metaphysics of human kinds.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Probability is double-faced from the start: aleatory and epistemic.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Looping effects describe how classifications change those they classify.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Reasoning styles bring with them new ways of being a candidate for truth or falsehood.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Statistics has helped to determine the form of laws of nature and what counts as a person.”
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“Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution”
Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. [...] Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world.[...] In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intel -
“Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution”
Notice that there is no sociology in the book. Scientific communities and their practices are, however, at its core, entering with paradigms, as we saw, at page 10 and continuing to the final page of the book. There had been sociology of scientific knowledge before Kuhn , but after Structure it burgeoned, leading to what is now called science studies. This is a self-generating field (with, of cour -
“Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50" (April 27, 2012)”
Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything—and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance. -
“There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.”
Chapter 1, An Absent Family Of Ideas, p. 4. -
“Chapter 1, An Absent Family Of Ideas, p. 4.”
There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside. -
“Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory . He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory , and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory.”
Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 23. -
“Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 23.”
Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory . He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory , and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory. -
“Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.”
Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 28. -
“Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.”
The Emergence Of Probability,1975 | Chapter 14, Equipossibility, p. 132.