It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. Willard Van Orman Quine More Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine More Quotes From Willard Van Orman Quine Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump. Willard Van Orman Quine psychology nature science 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 views philosophy reality The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones. Willard Van Orman Quine white father hands An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act. Willard Van Orman Quine evaluation faithful special 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. Willard Van Orman Quine perception light helping ... 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 men two ideas Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word. Willard Van Orman Quine transcendentalism divorced essence '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 only training appreciate independent
