W. V. O. Quine Quotes
Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher and logician, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the post-war era. His landmark 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction and the doctrine of reductionism, both central to logical positivism, and argued for a holistic conception of knowledge in which our beliefs face experience only as a corporate body. The quotes below are attributed to W. V. O. Quine, organized by topic.
W. V. O. Quine on Knowledge
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“No entity without identity.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.”
W. V. O. Quine on Truth
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Translation is indeterminate.”