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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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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
Father
Fabric
Facts
Fathers
Pale
Gray
Sentences
Fact
Lore
White
Convention
Black
Conventions

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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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 variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
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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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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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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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
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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
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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Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
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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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
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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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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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