Quotes from Ian Hacking

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

There are two basic ways to criticize an argument: â–  Challenge the premises-show that at least one is false. â–  Challenge the reasoning-show that the premises are not a good reason for the conclusion.

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 very phenomenon being investigated may be changed by the inquiry itself. It is as if there were a principle of human indeterminacy at work.

Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.