To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate. Willard Van Orman Quine More Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine More Quotes From Willard Van Orman Quine Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation. Willard Van Orman Quine quotations falsehood yield 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. Willard Van Orman Quine geography-and-history fabric men 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. Willard Van Orman Quine ships philosophical sea Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics. Willard Van Orman Quine mathematics names Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. Willard Van Orman Quine tendencies kind praise 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. Willard Van Orman Quine philosophical sea philosophy To be is to be the value of a variable. Willard Van Orman Quine variables values good-life We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it. Willard Van Orman Quine firsts Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it. Willard Van Orman Quine substitutes common-sense science 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. Willard Van Orman Quine degrees errors believe It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. Willard Van Orman Quine philosophy reality 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. . . . Willard Van Orman Quine coins light world 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. Willard Van Orman Quine benefits doe philosophy One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy. Willard Van Orman Quine fancy men book I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so. Willard Van Orman Quine accused consciousness done Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word. Willard Van Orman Quine objects sin confusion One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years. Willard Van Orman Quine couple men years Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part. Willard Van Orman Quine law math numbers Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as 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. Willard Van Orman Quine sheep heaven science No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives. Willard Van Orman Quine language doe two
