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Willard van Orman Quine

24 quotes

“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.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A mocking title for the 'protocol language' imagined by some of the logical positivists, in Word and Object (1960), section 1
“What then of the doctrinal side, the justification of our knowledge of truths about nature? Here, Hume despaired. By his identification of bodies with impressions he did succeed in construing some singular statements about bodies as indubitable truths ... But general statements, also singular statements about the future, gained no increment of certainty by being construed as about impressions. On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Epistemology Naturalized", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 72.
“Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126; originally written for a festschrift for Carl Gustav Hempel, this appears in a context explaining why induction tends to work in practice, despi…
“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Philosophy of Logic (1970)
“Set theory in sheep's clothing.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to Second-order logic, in Philosophy of Logic (1970)
“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quine's paradox, in "The Ways of Paradox" in "The Ways of Paradox and other Essays" (1976)
“Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976), p. 174
“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.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
“We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), p. 231
“Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
“Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response to being quoted William Shakespeare's statement from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy." As quoted in ‪When God is Gone Everything Is Holy: The Making Of …
“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. 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 conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source