Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.

Language is a social art.

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

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

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.

I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.