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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
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
Object
Sin
Objects
Word
Confusion
Originals
Original
Sign
More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
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
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
We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.
Willard Van Orman Quine
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
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
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
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
Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.
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
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Willard Van Orman Quine
To be is to be the value of a variable.
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
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
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
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
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
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
