Willard van Orman Quine - Ontological relativity (1969)

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

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
My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat — a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

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

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
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