Wise words from Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25th, 1908 – December 25th, 2000), an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, was known as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century".

Below we list some words of wisdom from Willard Van Orman Quine.

"Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about."

"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar."

"I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so."

"Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of."

"Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it."

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of 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."

"Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics."

"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."

"To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate."

"To be is to be the value of a variable."

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation."

"One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy."

"Language is a social art."

"Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right."

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

"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."

"The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings."

"Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes."

"Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word."

"Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it."

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor."

"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."

"We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it."

"One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years."

"It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described."

"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."

"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. . . ."

"No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives."

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

"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."

Copyright © Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo