List of Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

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.

... Two Men Could Be Just Alike In All Their Dispositions To Verbal Behavior Under All Possible Sensory Stimulations, And Yet Themeanings Or Ideas Expressed In Their Identically Triggered And Identically Sounding Utterances Could Diverge Radically, For The Two Men, In A Wide Range Of Cases.

We Cannot Stem Linguistic Change, But We Can Drag Our Feet. If Each Of Us Were To Defy Alexander Pope And Be The Last To Lay The Old Aside, It Might Not Be A Better World, But It Would Be A Lovelier Language.

Set Theory In Sheep's Clothing.

An Indirect Quotation We Can Usually Expect To Rate Only As Better Or Worse, More Or Less Faithful, And We Cannot Even Hope For Astrict Standard Of More And Less; What Is Involved Is Evaluation, Relative To Special Purposes, Of An Essentially Dramatic Act.

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.

Physics Investigates The Essential Nature Of The World, And Biology Describes A Local Bump. Psychology, Human Psychology, Describes A Bump On The Bump.

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.

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.

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.

The Strategy Of Semantic Ascent Is That It Carries The Discussion Into A Domain Where Both Parties Are Better Agreed On The Objects (viz., Words) And On The Main Terms Connecting Them. Words, Or Their Inscriptions, Unlike Points, Miles, Classes And The Rest, Are Tangible Objects Of The Size So Popular In The Marketplace, Where Men Of Unlike Conceptual Schemes Communicate At Their Best. The Strategy Is One Of Ascending To A Common Part Of Two Fundamentally Disparate Conceptual Schemes, The Better To Discuss The Disparate Foundations. No Wonder It Helps In Philosophy.

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.