Quotessence
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Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”

Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

Book:Word and Object
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Word and Object

This book delves into the nature of language and its impact on human cognition, offering a comprehensive analysis of the structure and function of words and objects in language. more

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Willard Van Orman Quine
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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“Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.”

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Book:Word and Object
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“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.”

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Author:Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.”

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Author:Willard Van Orman Quine
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“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.”

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Author:Willard Van Orman Quine
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“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.”

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