Daily Inspiration Quote by Ian Hacking

Restless curiosity is doing double duty here: it reads like a personal confession, but it’s also a quiet manifesto against intellectual turf wars. Ian Hacking isn’t praising “interdisciplinarity” as a campus buzzword. He’s naming a compulsion to cross borders because the borders themselves distort the view. That phrase “extraordinary curiosity” signals temperament more than method: an appetite that won’t be disciplined into a single department’s etiquette.

The real action is in the hinge: “the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.” Hacking spent his career poking at the places where facts and frameworks co-produce each other. He’s famous for showing how categories in psychology, psychiatry, and the human sciences don’t merely describe people; they can change how people understand themselves and behave. His notion of “looping effects” makes the social world look less like a passive object of measurement and more like a responsive system that talks back.

So the subtext is a rebuke to the fantasy of clean separation: physics over here, culture over there, each with its own sovereign truths. Hacking’s curiosity is “extraordinary” because it’s willing to be contaminated by multiple kinds of explanation without collapsing into relativism. Context matters too: late 20th-century philosophy of science was busy dismantling the myth of a single, universal scientific method while also fending off the caricature that “everything is just social construction.” Hacking’s line stakes out a third posture: skeptical, empirical, and deeply interested in how our ways of knowing become ways of being.