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
One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people ‘expect’ things to be discovered. – Ian Hacking
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. – 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
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
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
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 of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power. – Ian Hacking
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser. – 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
Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, ‘power’ and ‘knowledge.’ As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ are to be something else. – 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
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them. – Ian Hacking
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 not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things. – Ian Hacking
Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he’s ‘telling it as is it is’ insofar as talking about a process of ‘tinkering’ in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
