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:

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)
Set theory in sheep's clothing. View quote
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. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about. View quote
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. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar. View quote
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. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
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)
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Language is a social art. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
To be is to be the value of a variable. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
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)
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. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine