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1 " 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. "
― Ian Hacking , Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?
2 " The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea. "
― Ian Hacking , An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic
3 " Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are. "
― Ian Hacking , The Social Construction of What?
4 " Self knowledge is a virtue in its own right. We value the way in which people can fulfill their own natures by gaining an unsentimental self understanding. We think it is good to grow, for all our vices, into someone who is mature enough to face the past and the present, someone who understands how character, in its weaknesses as well as its strengths, is made of interlocking tendencies and gifts that have grown in the course of a life. The image of growth and maturing is Aristotelian rather than Kantian. These ancient values are ideals that none fully achieve, and yet they are modest, not seeking to find a meaning in life, but finding excellence in living and honoring life and its potentialities. "
― Ian Hacking ,
5 " There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame. "
6 " There are two basic ways to criticize an argument:■ Challenge the premises-show that at least one is false.■ Challenge the reasoning-show that the premises are not a good reason for the conclusion. "
7 " the very phenomenon being investigated may be changed by the inquiry itself. It is as if there were a principle of human indeterminacy at work. "
8 " Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past. "
9 " We now self-righteously condemn the sexually abusive male. Feminist critics find a lot of hypocrisy in this stance. It allows us to conceal from ourselves that the man's behavior is only an extreme form of a more commonplace aggression toward women and children that is condoned and even encouraged, both in popular media and within the economic power structure. "
10 " We now have many statistical software packages. Their power is incredible, but the pioneers of statistical inference would have mixed feelings, for they always insisted that people think before using a routine. In the old days routines took endless hours to apply, so one had to spend a lot of time thinking in order to justify using a routine. Now one enters data and presses a button. One result is that people seem to be cowed into not asking silly questions, such as: What hypothesis are you testing? What distribution is it that you say is not normal? What population are you talking about? Where did this base rate come from? Most important of all: Whose judgments do you use to calibrate scores on your questionnaires? Are those judgments generally agreed to by the qualified experts in the entire community? "
11 " At any time, people suffering severe psychological distress that is not of organic or other biological origin "choose" from socially available and clinically reinforced modes. "
12 " Any given study seems to prove a lot, but put together, they are so at odds with each other that the net effect is inconclusive. "
13 " Causes are objects of knowledge, and child abuse could be the cause of an illness only if it was something like what is called a natural kind, a kind of event found in nature and hooked up to other events by laws of nature. "
14 " And the conviction stands that there must be knowledge to be had, if only we could get it. Perhaps that is what is wrong: an assumption about the possibility of knowledge and the kind of knowledge that it must be. "
15 " Perhaps these gigantic unsystematic "systems" of health and justice play an important part in channeling and organizing symptoms and their display. Not only do people of different sex get caught by different systems, but also the functionaries and people with little pieces of authority within these systems work on those whom they catch in order to train them to fit in with expectations. And of course once you are caught by justice or mental health, the easiest thing to do is to behave as you are supposed to-violently or weakly, as the case may be. It becomes second nature. That is a traditional suggestion of labeling theory: people adapt their natures to the labels assigned to them by authority. "
