Top 34 W.v.o. Quine Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#3. 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
#4. It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.
Robert Quine
#5. Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#7. I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.
Robert Quine
#9. After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
Robert Quine
#10. Ours is thus a realism of lush and leafy spaces rather than deserts, with science regularly revealing new thickets of canopy. Anyone is welcome to go on sharing Quine's aesthetic appreciation of deserts, but we think the facts now suggest that we must reconcile ourselves to life in the rainforest.
Anonymous
#11. A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word
'Everything'
and everyone will accept this answer as true.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#12. Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#13. The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#14. From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.
Robert Quine
#15. An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
William James
#16. Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
[Carnap's famous plea for tolerance to which W.V. Quine took exception.]
Rudolf Carnap
#17. The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#18. 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
#20. Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#26. 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
#28. It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#29. 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
#30. Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#31. By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.
Robert Quine
#32. 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
#33. I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.
Robert Quine
#34. 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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