1001Philosophers

W. V. O. Quine Quotes on Truth

Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher and logician, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the post-war era. This page collects quotes attributed to W. V. O. Quine on the topic of truth, drawn from across the philosopher's works.

Quotes

  • Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:

    “To be is to be the value of a variable.”

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

  • Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:

    “No entity without identity.”

  • Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:

    “Translation is indeterminate.”