Willard van Orman Quine - Word and Object (1960)

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

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

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
Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

Willard van Orman Quine
To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.

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

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

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
Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.

Willard van Orman Quine
Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race.

Willard van Orman Quine
An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.

Willard van Orman Quine
A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.

Willard van Orman Quine
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.

Willard van Orman Quine