W.v. Quine Quotes & Sayings

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 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

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

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

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

To be is to be the value of a bound variable. — 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

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

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

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption. — 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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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