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Ideas of Ian Hacking, by Text

[Canadian, b.1936, At theUniversity of Toronto, and at Stanford University.]

1975 The Emergence of Probability
Ch.1 p.1 Probability was fully explained between 1654 and 1812
Ch.1 p.1 Probability is statistical (behaviour of chance devices) or epistemological (belief based on evidence)
Ch.10 p.86 Follow maths for necessary truths, and jurisprudence for contingent truths
Ch.2 p.14 Epistemological probability based either on logical implications or coherent judgments
Ch.3 p.22 In the medieval view, only deduction counted as true evidence
Ch.4 p.32 Formerly evidence came from people; the new idea was that things provided evidence
Ch.4 p.35 An experiment is a test, or an adventure, or a diagnosis, or a dissection [PG]
Ch.5 p.46 Gassendi is the first great empiricist philosopher
1979 What is Logic?
§06.2 p.233 'Thinning' ('dilution') is the key difference between deduction (which allows it) and induction
§06.3 p.233 Gentzen's Cut Rule (or transitivity of deduction) is 'If A |- B and B |- C, then A |- C'
§08 p.235 Only Cut reduces complexity, so logic is constructive without it, and it can be dispensed with
§09 p.238 With a pure notion of truth and consequence, the meanings of connectives are fixed syntactically
§10 p.239 A decent modern definition should always imply a semantics
§11 p.242 Perhaps variables could be dispensed with, by arrows joining places in the scope of quantifiers
§13 p.245 First-order logic is the strongest complete compact theory with Löwenheim-Skolem
§13 p.246 Second-order completeness seems to need intensional entities and possible worlds
§13 p.246 If it is a logic, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem holds for it
§13 p.247 A limitation of first-order logic is that it cannot handle branching quantifiers
§15 p.250 The various logics are abstractions made from terms like 'if...then' in English