Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Men
Paradox
Couple
Thousand
Another
Give
Take
Giving
Years
More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
Language is a social art.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
Willard Van Orman Quine
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Willard Van Orman Quine
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman Quine