Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

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 the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A 2009 poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993 for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning." In 1996 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for his "outstanding contributions to the progress of philosophy in the 20th century by proposing numerous theories based on keen insights in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of language."Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis but the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. His major writings include "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" , which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction between propositions and advocated a form of semantic holism, and Word and Object , which further developed these positions and introduced Quine's famous indeterminacy of translation thesis, advocating a behaviorist theory of meaning. He also developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input." He is also important in philosophy of science for his "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and for his conception of philosophy as continuous with science. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough." In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the "Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. June 1908 – 25. December 2000
Willard van Orman Quine photo

Works

Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Willard van Orman Quine
Word and Object
Word and Object
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine: 25   quotes 3   likes

Famous Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

“Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”

Response to being quoted William Shakespeare's statement from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy." As quoted in ‪When God is Gone Everything Is Holy: The Making Of A Religious Naturalist‬ (2008) by ‪Chet Raymo‬
1980s and later

“We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet.”

Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), p. 231
1980s and later
Context: 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.

“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
1980s and later

“Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”

"Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126; originally written for a festschrift for Carl Gustav Hempel, this appears in a context explaining why induction tends to work in practice, despite theoretical objections. The hyphen in "praise-worthy" is ambiguous, since it falls on a line break in the source.
1960s

Willard van Orman Quine Quotes about the truth

“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”

Philosophy of Logic (1970)
1970s

Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

“Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it.”

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)
Context: Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

“Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.”

"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”

Quine's paradox, in "The Ways of Paradox" in "The Ways of Paradox and other Essays" (1976)
1970s

“Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.”

Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976), p. 174
1970s

“A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.”

A mocking title for the 'protocol language' imagined by some of the logical positivists, in "Word and Object (1960), section 1
1960s

“The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.”

"Two dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“Set theory in sheep's clothing.”

Referring to Second-order logic, in Philosophy of Logic (1970)
1970s

“Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”

Les Deux Dogmes de l'empirisme

“Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.”

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.”

Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
1980s and later

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