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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.
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
Men
Unscientific
Beset
Deplorable
Distinguished
Scientist
Desire
Right
More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula To be is to be the value of a variable this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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
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
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
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
Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
Willard Van Orman Quine
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
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
Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.
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
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
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman Quine
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Willard Van Orman Quine
