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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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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
Failure
Doomed
Principles
Equally
Called
Definition
Science
Definitions
Truth
Scientific
Even
Principle
Pragmatism
Way
Method
Affords
Unique
Pragmatic
More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
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.
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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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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
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No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
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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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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
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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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Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.
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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.
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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
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
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
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
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
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