Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes.
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.
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
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.
One man’s antinomy is another man’s falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
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.
Language is a social art.
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
To be is to be the value of a variable.
Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
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.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
