Willard van Orman Quine (1908 – 2000)
Influential 20th Century American philosopher and logician.
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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.
We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
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 word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.
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