"Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!"

Ian Hacking Philosophy See all quotes by Ian Hacking →

React to this quote

More by Ian Hacking

“From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.”

“Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.”

“Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.”

“Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.”

“When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.”

“Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Well, first of all, if you’re not—if you’ve never been on a soap box, it’s sort of awkward. You get up on a chair, and you look out—‘specially when the guy will precede you by saying “And the next spe…"

— Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran)

Military1910–1995

#humor

"There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopen…"

— Michel Foucault

Literature1926–1984

#philosophy

"Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space."

— Thomas Pynchon

Literature1760–1796

#humor