Willard van Orman Quine quotes

Willard van Orman Quine was an influential American philosopher and logician, recognized for his work in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology. His critiques of logical positivism and his arguments for the indeterminacy of translation have deeply shaped analytic philosophy. He made lasting contributions to twentieth-century thought and remains central to many philosophical debates. Here are 37 of his quotes:

Set theory in sheep's clothing.

Willard van Orman Quine

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

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

Willard van Orman Quine

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

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

Language is a social art.

Willard van Orman Quine

To be is to be the value of a variable.

Willard van Orman Quine

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Willard van Orman Quine

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Willard van Orman Quine

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Willard van Orman Quine

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

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

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

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

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

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Willard van Orman Quine

A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.

Willard van Orman Quine