Willard van Orman Quine Short Quotes

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A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.

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

Willard van Orman Quine
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

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

Willard van Orman Quine
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

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

Willard van Orman Quine
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

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

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

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

Willard van Orman Quine
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.

Willard van Orman Quine
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

Willard van Orman Quine
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

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
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

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

Willard van Orman Quine
Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.

Willard van Orman Quine
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

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
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
It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another.

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

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
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
Entification begins at arm's length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses.

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
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
It is the tension between the scientist's laws and his own attempted breaches of them that powers the engines of science and makes it forge ahead.

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