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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
Even
Principle
Pragmatism
Way
Method
Affords
Unique
Pragmatic
Failure
Doomed
Principles
Equally
Called
Definition
Science
Definitions
Truth
Scientific

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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
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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.
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Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
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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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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.
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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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Set theory in sheep's clothing.
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Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
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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.
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Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
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To be is to be the value of a variable.
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Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.
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One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
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Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
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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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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
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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.
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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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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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