27 Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

Willard van Orman Quine quotes

1. 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.

2. To be is to be the value of a bound variable.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

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

4. Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

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

6. Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

7. A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.

8. 'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

9. 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.

1. 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.

2. Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.

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

8. 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.

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

10. 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.

11. Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

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

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

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