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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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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
Proved
Nicknamed
Must
Frequently
Dulling
Edge
Razor
Edges
Razors
Doctrine
Tangled
Otherwise
Historically
Tough
Beard
Sense
Plato
Occam

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Language is a social art.
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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.
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Set theory in sheep's clothing.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
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Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
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Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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To be is to be the value of a variable.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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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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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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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