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A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true.

Willard Van Orman Quine

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Willard Van Orman Quine
Age: 92 †
Born: 1908
Born: June 25
Died: 2000
Died: December 25
Analytic Philosopher
Epistemologist
Linguist
Logician
Mathematician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Language
Philosopher Of Science
Professor
Akron
Ohio
W. V. Quine
Problem
Accept
Everything
Answer
Ontological
Thing
Accepting
Saxon
Answers
Anglo
Word
Moreover
Everyone
Answered
Three
Curious
True
Simplicity

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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Language is a social art.
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The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
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Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
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No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
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Set theory in sheep's clothing.
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Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
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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.
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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.
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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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... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.
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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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Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
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. . . .
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Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
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