Willard van Orman Quine Quotes
1908–2000 United States
Willard Van Orman Quine (25 June 1908 – 25 December 2000) was an influential 20th Century American philosopher and logician.
- United States
- Academics
- Logicians
- Philosophers
Also known as: Quine, Quine, Willard van Orman, W. V. O. Quine, W. V. Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine, Quinean
Random Willard van Orman Quine quote
24 quotes
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976)
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Philosophy of Logic (1970)
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
The Web of Belief (1970)
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament.
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.
The Web of Belief (1970)
Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.
Well, for me, it's clarification of the nature of the world, the nature of reality. I seek the same satisfaction that one looks for in science in general, in theoretical science.
No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
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.
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
Logic and mathematics seem to be the only domains where self-evidence manages to rise above triviality; and this it does, in those domains, by a linking of self-evidence on to self-evidence in the chain reaction known as proof.