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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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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
Worthy
Praise
Creatures
Dies
Wrong
Reproducing
Kind
Pathetic
Tendency
Tendencies

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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.
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Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
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Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
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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.
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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.
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Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
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One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
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At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.
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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.
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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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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
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Language is a social art.
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Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physicswe adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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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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Set theory in sheep's clothing.
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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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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