willard van orman quine

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth which simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is likewise a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

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It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extra-linguistic fact. The statement 'Brutus killed Caesar' would be false if the world had been different in certain ways, but it would also be false if the word 'killed' happened rather to have the sense of 'begat'. Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analysable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null and that these are the analytic statements. But for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between the analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.

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If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

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For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions....

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It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

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'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.

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One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

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

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Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

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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.

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Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

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Language is a social art.

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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

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To be is to be the value of a variable.

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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

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