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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

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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
Writing
Logical
Definition
Mathematical
Occurrence
Definitions
Dangerously
Doubt
Reassuring
Word
Owing
Sound
Writings
Come
Frequent

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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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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Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Language is a social art.
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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.
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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
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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
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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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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Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
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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The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
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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Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Set theory in sheep's clothing.
Willard Van Orman Quine