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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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

“Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.”

Willard van Orman Quine

"On What There Is"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

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

Willard van Orman Quine

S. 41
The Web of Belief (1970)

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

Willard van Orman Quine

"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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

Philosophy of Logic (1970)
1970s

“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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

S.4
The Web of Belief (1970)

“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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

Willard van Orman Quine Quotes

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

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

"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)

Way , Sense , Universe

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Way

“A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.”

Willard van Orman Quine book Word and Object

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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Mathematics

“Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.”

Willard van Orman Quine

From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

"On What There Is"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“Set theory in sheep's clothing.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Clothes

“Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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

“My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap's doctrine of the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”

Willard van Orman Quine

Les Deux Dogmes de l'empirisme

World , Sense

“The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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

Science , Housing , Question

“Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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

Law

“No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
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.”

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Life , Making love , Feeling , Time

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