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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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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
States
Molecules
Must
Systematic
Like
Mental
Case
Development
Theory
Events
Efficacy
Cases
Indirect

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To be is to be the value of a variable.
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We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.
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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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Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
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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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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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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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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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Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
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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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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
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.
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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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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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Language is a social art.
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The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
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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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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Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
Willard Van Orman Quine