Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
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.
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
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.
Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
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.
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.
Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll.