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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.

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
Middle
Chemistry
Nature
Doctrine
May
Endure
Immemorial
Physical
Sized
Ordinary
Enduring
Objects
Chapter
Second
Chapters
Theory
Deliberate

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.
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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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The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
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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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Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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
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It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
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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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One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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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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.
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
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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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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with 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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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
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Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
Willard Van Orman Quine