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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.

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
Taxes
Expense
Wishful
Mass
Masses
Applaud
Public
Expenses
Subsidies
State
Thinker
Yields
States
Yield
Calculated
Income
Thinkers
Benighted
Burden
Lottery
Subsidy
Intelligence
Prudent
Lighten

More quotes by 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.
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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Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
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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Language is a social art.
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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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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