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Linguist Inspirational Quotes (10874)

Page 22 of 454
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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
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Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Language is a social art.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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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
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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .
Willard Van Orman Quine
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No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.
Thomas Huxley
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Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
Samuel Johnson
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
H. L. Mencken
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If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong.
Noam Chomsky
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If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
George Bernard Shaw
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We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.
George Bernard Shaw
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And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good. and A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives.
Samuel Johnson
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