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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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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
Might
Lays
Lovelier
Would
Feet
Linguistic
World
Lasts
Defy
Last
Alexander
Language
Stem
Cannot
Pope
Change
Drag
Better
Aside
More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
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
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
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
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
The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Willard Van Orman Quine
An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
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
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
To be is to be the value of a variable.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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
... 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
Language is a social art.
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
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
Willard Van Orman Quine
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Willard Van Orman Quine
