Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century." From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth25 June 1908
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true.
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
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.