Willard van Orman Quine - Language Quotes

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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

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

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