W. V. O. Quine Quotes on Truth
Quine's deflationary or disquotational treatment of truth — articulated across Word and Object (1960), Philosophy of Logic (1970), and Pursuit of Truth (1990) — preserves Tarski's semantic insight while resisting the realist metaphysics that some philosophers have read into it. The truth predicate functions as a useful device of generalization across whole infinite classes of sentences (everything Plato said is true) without committing the user to a substantial relation of correspondence between sentences and facts. The framework integrates with the broader Quinean naturalism: epistemology continuous with empirical psychology, ontology determined by what our best confirmed theories quantify over, semantic relations cashed out behaviorally rather than through any inner mentalist apparatus.
Quotes
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“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
On What There Is -
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:
“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:
“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:
“Translation is indeterminate.”
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“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.”
The Web of Belief(1970) | S.4 -
“"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation " yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”
1970s | Quine's paradox , in "The Ways of Paradox" in "The Ways of Paradox and other Essays" (1976) -
“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”
1970s | Philosophy of Logic (1970)