Willard Van Orman Quine > Quotes

“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 conceptions only as cultural posits.”
― W.V. Quine

“Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption. ”
― W.V. 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.”
― W.V.O. 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

“Language is a social art.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object

“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, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays

“Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, Set Theory and Its Logic

“Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump. ”
― W.V. Quine

“Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.”
― W.V.O. Quine

“To be is to be the value of a bound variable.”
― W.V. Quine, Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
― W.V.O. 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

“Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”
― W.V.O. Quine, Theories and Things

“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.”
― W.V. Quine, Mathematical Logic

“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.”
― W.V.O. Quine

“No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”
― 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.”
― W.V.O. 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

“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

“The three main mediaeval 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.

Realism, as the word is used in connection with the mediaeval controversy over universals, is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them. Logicism, represented by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church, and Carnap, condones the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately.

Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. Intuitionism, espoused in modern times in one form or another by Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl, and others, countenances the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities only when those entities are capable of being cooked up individually from ingredients specified in advance. As Fraenkel has put it, logicism holds that classes are discovered while intuitionism holds that they are invented—a fair statement indeed of the old opposition between realism and conceptualism. This opposition is no mere quibble; it makes an essential difference in the amount of classical mathematics to which one is willing to subscribe. Logicists, or realists, are able on their assumptions to get Cantor’s ascending orders of infinity; intuitionists are compelled to stop with the lowest order of infinity, and, as an indirect consequence, to abandon even some of the classical laws of real numbers. The modern controversy between logicism and intuitionism arose, in fact, from disagreements over infinity.

Formalism, associated with the name of Hilbert, echoes intuitionism in deploring the logicist’s unbridled recourse to universals. But formalism also finds intuitionism unsatisfactory. This could happen for either of two opposite reasons. The formalist might, like the logicist, object to the crippling of classical mathematics; or he might, like the nominalists of old, object to admitting abstract entities at all, even in the restrained sense of mind-made entities. The upshot is the same: the formalist keeps classical mathematics as a play of insignificant notations. This play of notations can still be of utility—whatever utility it has already shown itself to have as a crutch for physicists and technologists. But utility need not imply significance, in any literal linguistic sense. Nor need the marked success of mathematicians in spinning out theorems, and in finding objective bases for agreement with one another’s results, imply significance. For an adequate basis for agreement among mathematicians can be found simply in the rules which govern the manipulation of the notations—these syntactical rules being, unlike the notations themselves, quite significant and intelligible.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

“Nonsense is indeed mere absence of sense, and can always be remedied by arbitrarily assigning some sense.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays

“To be is to be a value of a variable. There are no ultimate philosophical problems concerning singular terms and their references, but only concerning variables and their values; and there are no ultimate philosophical problems concerning existence except insofar as existence is expressed by the quentifier ‘∃x’.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, Methods of Logic

“The Humean predicament is the human predicament.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“The student who majors in philosophy primarily for spiritual comfort is misguided and probably not a very good student anyway, since intellectual curiosity is not what moves him.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“How many possible men are there in that doorway?”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays

“Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all. My countersuggestion, issuing essentially form Carnap's doctrine of the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine