Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

Willard van Orman Quine
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
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Willard van Orman Quine
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

Willard van Orman Quine
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.

Willard van Orman Quine
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Willard van Orman Quine
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

Willard van Orman Quine
Science is like a boat, which we rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat.

Willard van Orman Quine
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

Willard van Orman Quine
I philosophize from the vantage point only of our own provincial conceptual scheme and scientific epoch, true; but I know no better.

Willard van Orman Quine
There is no breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining its members in other terms.

Willard van Orman Quine
Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

Willard van Orman Quine
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.

Willard van Orman Quine
English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.

Willard van Orman Quine
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.

Willard van Orman Quine
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.

Willard van Orman Quine
We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.

Willard van Orman Quine
An infinitesimal is supposed to go into 1 notjust sixteen times, or a thousand times, but infinitely many times.

Willard van Orman Quine
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

Willard van Orman Quine
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
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.

Willard van Orman Quine
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Willard van Orman Quine
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
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.

Willard van Orman Quine
On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along today than where [David] Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament.

Willard van Orman Quine
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.

Willard van Orman Quine
Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.

Willard van Orman Quine
Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.

Willard van Orman Quine
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.

Willard van Orman Quine
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word — 'Everything'.

Willard van Orman Quine