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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.

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
Needed
Yearning
Help
Reasoning
Helping
Root
Truth
Skill
Data
Admittedly
Scientific
Receptivity
Roots
Ingenuity
Skills
Inquiry

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
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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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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
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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.
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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
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. . . .
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.
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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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To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.
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
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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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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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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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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 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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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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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
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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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
Willard Van Orman Quine