Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

28 quotes in 414 categories

• To be is to be the value of a variable.
• Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
• Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
• Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most…
• 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…
• Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation
• Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
• Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
• No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
• Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
• Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated…
• For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific…
• Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of…
• 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…
• 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 totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest lawsof atomic physics or even…
• The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
• The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
• Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
• One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

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