Willard Van Orman Quine
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.Collection: Science
To be is to be the value of a variable.Collection: Brainy
Language is a social art.Collection: Art
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
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.
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
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.
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.Collection: Men
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.Collection: Tree
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.Collection: Way
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.Collection: Science
Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.Collection: Yield
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.Collection: Philosophical
To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Philosophy
Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.Collection: Names
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.Collection: Done
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.Collection: Writing
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.Collection: Desert
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.Collection: Kind
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.Collection: Plato
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.Collection: Life Is
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.Collection: Couple
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.Collection: Philosophy
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.Collection: Texture
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true.Collection: Simplicity
Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.Collection: Men
Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.Collection: Light
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 lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .Collection: Light
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.Collection: Believe
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.Collection: Logic
Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.Collection: Choices
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Growing Up
How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.Collection: Doctrine
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.Collection: Data
The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Book
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.Collection: Science
The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.Collection: Music
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 philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.Collection: Science
Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.Collection: Math
Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.Collection: Acceptance
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.Collection: Order