Willard Quine Quotes

Language is a social art.

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

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.

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.]

Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

How many possible men are there in that doorway?

Nonsense is indeed mere absence of sense, and can always be remedied by arbitrarily assigning some sense.

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

The Humean predicament is the human predicament.

Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as chapter of psychology and hence of natural science.

We may […] view set theory, and mathematics generally, in much the way in which we view theoretical portions of the natural sciences themselves; as comprising truths or hypotheses

Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two things to be alike? Or, finally, is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? —WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE 1953, P. 4

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.

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’.

Naturalism is naturally associated with physicalism, or materialism. I do not equate them, as witness my earlier remark on Cartesian dualism. I do embrace physicalism as a scientific position, but I could be dissuaded of it on future scientific grounds without being dissuaded of naturalism. Quantum mechanics today, indeed, in its neoclassical or Copenhagen interpretation, has a distinctly mentalistic ring. My naturalism has evidently been boiling down to the claim that in our pursuit of truth about the world we cannot do better than our traditional scientific procedure, the hypothetico-deductive method.

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.

The pragmatists James, Schiller, and Dewey viewed science as a conceptual shorthand for organizing observations ... and now I, for all my vaunted naturalism, seem drawn into the same position. Is there no difference? The difference is to be sought in ontology ... Dewey's reality consisted of observable objects ... For naturalistic philosophers such as I, on the other hand, physical objects are real, right down to the most hypothetical of particles, though this recognition of them is subject, like all science, to correction. I can hold this ontological line of naive and unregenerate realism, and at the same time I can hail man as largely the author rather than discoverer of truth. I can hold both lines because the scientific truth about physical objects is still the truth, for all man's authorship. In my naturalism, I recognize no higher truth than that which science provides or seeks.

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.

Mathematicians attain precision because of the abstractness of their objects, and they confuse sign and object for the same reason. Physical things are palpably unlike their names; numbers and other mathematical objects, however, are not even palpable.

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.

Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when.

There are those who find it soothing to say that the analytic statements of the second class reduce to those of the first class, the logical truths, by definition; 'bachelor,' for example, is defined as 'unmarried man.' But how do we find that 'bachelor' is defined as 'unmarried man'? Who defined it thus, and when? Are we to appeal to the nearest dictionary, and accept the lexicographer's formulation as law? Clearly this would be to put the cart before the horse. The lexicographer is an empirical scientist, whose business is the recording of antecedent facts; and if he glosses 'bachelor' as 'unmarried man' it is because of his belief that there is a relation of synonymy between these forms, implicit in general or preferred usage prior to his own work. The notion of synonymy presupposed here has still to be clarified, presumably in terms relating to linguistic behavior. Certainly the 'definition' which is the lexicographer's report of an observed synonymy cannot be taken as the ground of the synonymy.

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.

The science game is not committed to the physical, whatever that means. Bodies have long since diffused into swarms of particles, and the Bose–Einstein statistic has challenged the particularity of the particle. Even telepathy and clairvoyance are scientific options, however moribund.

My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from 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.

Freedom from the trammels of an age outworn can mean quandaries at every turn, for want of a rule, a precedent, a role model, even a vivid self-image.

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.

The ontologies of physical objects and mathematical objects are myths. The quality of myth, however, is relative; relative, in this case, to the epistemological point of view. This point of view is one among various, corresponding to one among our various interests and purposes.

Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.

They think they are talking about negation, ‘~’, ‘not’; but surely the notation ceased to be recognizable as negation when they took to regarding some conjunctions of the form ‘p & ~p’ as true, and stopped regarding such sentences as implying all others. Here, evidently, is the deviant logician’s predicament: when he tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject.

Credit is due to man's inveterate ingenuity, or human sapience, for having worked around the blinding dazzle of color vision and found the more significant regularities elsewhere. Evidently natural selection has dealt with the conflict [between visible and invisible similarities] by endowing man doubly: with both a color-slanted quality space and the ingenuity to rise above it. He has risen above it by developing modified systems of kinds, hence modified similarity standards for scientific purposes. By the [inductive] trial-and-error process of theorizing he has regrouped things into new kinds which prove to lend themselves to many inductions better than the old.

A man's judgments of similarity do and should depend on his theory [universal propositions], on his beliefs; but similarity itself, what the man's judgments purport to be judgments of, [is] an objective relation in the world. It belongs in the [generic] subject matter not of our [universal] theory ... about the world, but of our [universal] theory of the [generic] world itself. Such would be the acceptable and reputable sort of similarity concept, if it could be defined.

And so come the cults, claiming to meet the needs that science has thus far failed to meet--and offering the prospective inductee a place on the ground floor. Some cults may be harmless enough, but whenever false doctrine is propagated there is some cost. Many such doctrines are dressed up as science in their own right. For even though established science may be distrusted, "science" is still a thumps-up word for most people. So we find many of these theories borrowing liberally from genuine science, and many more using terms that sound, to the uninitiated, like the stuff of which true science is made. Now many of the bogus doctrines are actually unintelligible; their seeming content simply vanishes when closely scrutinized. But given the incomprehensibility of so much genuine science for so many of us, that very unintelligibility can be mistaken as a sign of authenticity. Alas, it can even inspire reverence.

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.

The Preface states, "This little book is a compact introduction to the study of rational belief. It is meant to afford a coherent view of a broad philosophical terrain, providing points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language." Quoting page 8: We will broach many of the criteria by which reasonable belief may be discriminated from unreasonable belief. But not only are the criteria not foolproof; they do not always even point in a unique direction. When we meet the Virtues for assessing hypotheses we will find that they require us to look at candidates for belief in multiple ways, to weigh together a variety of considerations. Decisions in science, as in life, can be difficult. There is no simple touchstone for responsible belief.