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Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

“We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”

Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

Author

Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher known for his work in logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. He is considered one of the leading analytic philosophers of the 20th century. more

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“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”

Firsts Philosophy Sea Figures Position Philosophical Boat Staying Naturalism Vantage Point Groundwork

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”

Mind Humans States Reason Body Today Lines Animal Consciousness Special Events Activity Denial Substance Materialism Faculty Conventional Identification Conventional Wisdom

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”

Ifs States Cases Events Theory Development Systematic Molecules Efficacy Indirect

Book:Word and Object

Source: Word and Object

“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”

Philosophy Reality Three Names Views Century Mathematics Point Of View Doctrine Historian Realism Twentieth Century Medieval Surveys

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.”

Men Two Ideas Cases Behavior Wide Range Disposition Sensory Utterance Stimulation Intentionality

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“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.”

Thinking Principles Acceptance Theory Physics Reasonable Schemes Simplest Fragments Ontology Scientific Theory

Book:Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine

Source: Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine

“Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”

Helping Light Perception Notion Sensory

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.”

Names Mathematics

Book:The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

Source: The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”

Purpose Special Involved Standards Rate Faithful Dramatic Relative Quotations Evaluation Indirect Intentionality

Book:Word and Object

Source: Word and Object

“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”

Source: The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays