Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes
-
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
→ -
Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.
→ -
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
→ -
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
→ -
Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.
→ -
The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
→ -
Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
→ -
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
→ -
Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
→ -
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.
→ -
To be is to be the value of a variable.
→ -
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
→ -
English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
→ -
Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
→ -
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
→ -
An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
→ -
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
→ -
We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.
→ -
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
→ -
To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.
→ -
My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.
→ -
Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.
→ -
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
→ -
Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
→ -
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
→ -
If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.
→ -
... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.
→ -
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
→ -
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
→ -
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
→
Willard Van Orman Quine
- Born: June 25, 1908
- Died: December 25, 2000
- Occupation: Philosopher
Related Authors
-
Pierre Duhem Philosopher -
Nelson Goodman Philosopher -
Hilary Putnam Philosopher -
Rudolf Carnap Philosopher -
Wilfrid Sellars Philosopher -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
David Hume Philosopher -
Gottlob Frege Mathematician -
John Dewey Philosopher -
Saul Kripke Philosopher -
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosopher -
Karl Popper Philosopher -
Richard Rorty Philosopher -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Donald Davidson Philosopher -
Alfred Tarski Logician -
Thomas Kuhn Physicist -
Charles Sanders Peirce Philosopher -
Michael Dummett Philosopher