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Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

“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.”

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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“... 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

“To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.”

Real Process Existence Building Theory Cost Built Description Artificial Standpoint

Book:Word and Object

Source: Word and Object

“Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.”

May Middle Objects Theory Ordinary Endure Doctrine Chemistry Chapters Deliberate

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine

“One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.”

Men Giving Years Couple Thousand Paradox One Man Thousand Years Another Man

Book:The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

Source: The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

“Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.”

May Comfort Distinction Reflecting Unreal

Author:Willard Van Orman Quine