Quote

Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Mathematics
Name
Names

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

Image
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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
Image
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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
Image
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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
Image
Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physicswe adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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
Image
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Image
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
Image
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine