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Physical Objects Are Conceptually Imported Into The Situation As Convenient Intermediaries Not By Definition In Terms Of Experience, But Simply As Irreducible Posits Comparable, Epistemologically, To The Gods Of Homer . . . For My Part I Do, Qua Lay Physicist, Believe In Physical Objects And Not In Homer's Gods; And I Consider It A Scientific Error To Believe Otherwise. But In Point Of Epistemological Footing, The Physical Objects And The Gods Differ Only In Degree And Not In Kind. Both Sorts Of Entities Enter Our Conceptions Only As Cultural Posits.

-Willard Van Orman Quine

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Physical Objects Are Conceptually

Willard Van Orman Quine

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Physical Objects Are Conceptually Imported Into The Situation As Convenient Intermediaries Not By Definition In Terms Of Experience, But Simply As Irreducible Posits Comparable, Epistemologically, To The Gods Of Homer . . . For My Part I Do, Qua Lay Physicist, Believe In Physical Objects And Not In Homer's Gods; And I Consider It A Scientific Error To Believe Otherwise. But In Point Of Epistemological Footing, The Physical Objects And The Gods Differ Only In Degree And Not In Kind. Both Sorts Of Entities Enter Our Conceptions Only As Cultural Posits.

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Irrefragability, Thy Name Is Mathematics.

Creatures Inveterately Wrong In Their Inductions Have A Pathetic But Praise-worthy Tendency To Die Before Reproducing Their Kind.

Our Acceptance Of An Ontology Is, I Think, Similar In Principle To Our Acceptance Of A Scientific Theory, Say A System Of Physics;we Adopt, At Least Insofar As We Are Reasonable, The Simplest Conceptual Scheme Into Which The Disordered Fragments Of Raw Experience Can Be Fitted And Arranged.

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Yields Falsehood When Preceded By Its Quotation.

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Geography And History

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We Cannot Stem Linguistic Change, But We Can Drag Our Feet. If Each Of Us Were To Defy Alexander Pope And Be The Last To Lay The Old Aside, It Might Not Be A Better World, But It Would Be A Lovelier Language.

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Logic Chases Truth Up The Tree Of Grammar.

Different Persons Growing Up In The Same Language Are Like Different Bushes Trimmed And Trained To Take The Shape Of Identical Elephants. The Anatomical Details Of Twigs And Branches Will Fulfill The Elephantine Form Differently From Bush To Bush, But The Overall Outward Results Are Alike.

... Two Men Could Be Just Alike In All Their Dispositions To Verbal Behavior Under All Possible Sensory Stimulations, And Yet Themeanings Or Ideas Expressed In Their Identically Triggered And Identically Sounding Utterances Could Diverge Radically, For The Two Men, In A Wide Range Of Cases.

The Familiar Material Objects May Not Be All That Is Real, But They Are Admirable Examples.

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