Willard Van Orman Quine

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

“Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

— Willard Van Orman Quine

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants.…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

— Willard Van Orman Quine