Ian Hacking: Developer

Ian Hacking is Canadian philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on developer.

Ian Hacking: 32 quotes0 likes

“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 intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers.
It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work…”

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 course, its own journals and societies) that includes some work in the history and the philosophy of sciences and technology, but whose emphasis is on sociological approaches of various kinds, some observational, some theoretical. Much, and perhaps most, of the really original thinking about the sciences after Kuhn has had a sociological bent.
Kuhn was hostile to these developments. In the opinion of many younger workers, that is regrettable. Let us put it down to dissatisfaction with growing pains of the field, rather than venturing into tedious metaphors about fathers and sons. One of Kuhn’s marvelous legacies is science studies as we know it today.”

Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution

“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.”

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 1, An Absent Family Of Ideas, p. 4.