Ian Hacking

“The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun.”

“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.”

“It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.”

“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.”

“The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self.”

“It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.”

“Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.”

“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.”

“Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.”

“The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.”

“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.”

“As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.”

“All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.”

“Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.”

“Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.”

“Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life.”

“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.”