Quotes & Sayings About 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 saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying. — Robert Quine

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are 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

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. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole. — William Gibson

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Language is a social art. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest lawsof atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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

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

Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation — Willard Van Orman Quine

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics. — Robert Quine

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71. — Robert Quine

I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me. — Robert Quine

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. — Willard Van Orman Quine

To be is to be the value of a bound variable. — Willard Van Orman Quine

No milk, gone out for breakfast, then to Hamleys, want to beat crowds. PS Know who killed Quine. — Robert Galbraith

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

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

Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one. — Willard Van Orman Quine

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to. — Robert Quine

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar. — 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

Christmas," said Robin, with a faint grin but without apology. "I was going to put it up yesterday, but after Leonora was charged I didn't feel very festive. Anyway, I've got you an appointment to see her at six. You'll need to take photo ID - " "Good work, thanks." " - and I got you sandwiches and I thought you might like to see this," she said. "Michael Fancourt's given an interview about Quine." She passed him a pack of cheese and pickle sandwiches and a copy of The Times, folded to the correct page. Strike lowered himself onto the farting leather sofa and ate while reading the article, which was adorned with a split photograph. On the left-hand side was a picture of Fancourt standing in front of an Elizabethan country house. Photographed from below, his head — Robert Galbraith

I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting. — Robert Quine

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

Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll. — Willard Van Orman Quine

To mention Boston we use 'Boston' or a synonym, and to mention 'Boston' we use ' 'Boston' ' or a synonym. ' 'Boston' ' contains six letters and just one pair of quotation marks; 'Boston' contains six letters and no quotation marks; and Boston contains some 800,000 people. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Work on causal theories of knowledge - early work by Armstrong, and Dretske, and Goldman - seemed far more satisfying. As I started to see the ways in which work in the cognitive sciences could inform our understanding of central epistemological issues, my whole idea of what the philosophical enterprise is all about began to change. Quine certainly played a role here, as did Putnam's (pre-1975) work in philosophy of science, and the exciting developments that went on in that time in philosophy of mind. — Hilary Kornblith

But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine. — Hilary Kornblith

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren. — Ian Hacking

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence ... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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. — 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

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. — Willard Van Orman Quine

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

Bealer argues that the kind of naturalistic view which Quine holds will rob him of the ability to make the normative claims which (many) naturalists wish to make in epistemology. I don't think this is right about Quine, but I'm certain it's not right about my own view. To the extent that I can show that talk of knowledge is firmly rooted within empirical theories where it plays an important explanatory role, I thereby demonstrate its naturalistic credentials. — Hilary Kornblith

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

From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home. — Robert Quine

Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: There
are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
To which Quine is said to have responded: Possibly, but my concern is that
there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth. — Chet Raymo

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. — Willard Van Orman Quine

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word. — Willard Van Orman Quine

By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job. — Robert Quine

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples. — 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

Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records. — Robert Quine

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. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal. — Willard Van Orman Quine

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat
a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with. — Robert Quine

I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. — William Gibson

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

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz. — Robert Quine

To be is to be the value of a variable. — Willard Van Orman Quine

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience. — Robert Quine

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it. — Willard Van Orman Quine

To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Philosophy of science is philosophy enough. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).

Major philosophers of Flew's generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs.

In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God's existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew's innovative publications did. — Antony Flew

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we 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

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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

To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies. — Willard Van Orman Quine

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of. — Willard Van Orman Quine

I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell. — Robert Quine

I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands. — Robert Quine

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

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body. — Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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

I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so. — Willard Van Orman Quine

By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso. — Robert Quine

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

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

How many possible men are there in that doorway? — Willard Van Orman Quine

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