"Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation……" — Willard Van Orman Quine
"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."
—
Willard Van Orman Quine
★
★
★
★
★
0.0 avg (0 ratings)
28 Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine has 28 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
-
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…
-
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…
-
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does…
-
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 ...…
-
For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are…
See all 28 quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine »