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The Variables Of Quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' Range Over Our Whole Ontology, Whatever It May Be; And We Are Convicted Of A Particular Ontological Presupposition If, And Only If, The Alleged Presuppositum Has To Be Reckoned Among The Entities Over Which Our Variables Range In Order To Render One Of Our Affirmations True.

-Willard Van Orman Quine

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The Variables Of Quantification,

Willard Van Orman Quine

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The Variables Of Quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' Range Over Our Whole Ontology, Whatever It May Be; And We Are Convicted Of A Particular Ontological Presupposition If, And Only If, The Alleged Presuppositum Has To Be Reckoned Among The Entities Over Which Our Variables Range In Order To Render One Of Our Affirmations True.

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Meaning Is What Essence Becomes When It Is Divorced From The Object Of Reference And Wedded To The Word.

Transcendentalism

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Some Have Said That The Thesis [of Indeterminacy] Is A Consequence Of My Behaviorism. Some Have Said That It Is A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of My Behaviorism. I Disagree With This Second Point, But I Agree With The First. I Hold Further That The Behaviorism Approach Is Mandatory. In Psychology One May Or May Not Be A Behaviorist, But In Linguistics One Has No Choice.

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.

No Two Of Us Learn Our Language Alike, Nor, In A Sense, Does Any Finish Learning It While He Lives.

The Lore Of Our Fathers Is A Fabric Of Sentences. A Pale Gray Lore, Black With Fact And White With Convention.

Set Theory In Sheep's Clothing.

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.

The Lore Of Our Fathers Is A Fabric Of Sentences. In Our Hands It Develops And Changes, Through More Or Less Arbitrary And Deliberate Revisions And Additions Of Our Own, More Or Less Directly Occasioned By The Continuing Stimulation Of Our Sense Organs. It Is A Pale Gray Lore, Black With Fact And White With Convention. But I Have Found No Substantial Reasons For Concluding That There Are Any Quite Black Threads In It, Or Any White Ones.

The Totality Of Our So-called Knowledge Or Beliefs, From The Most Casual Matters Of Geography And History To The Profoundest Laws Of Atomic Physics Or Even Of Pure Mathematics And Logic, Is A Man-made Fabric Which Impinges On Experience Only Along The Edges. Or, To Change The Figure, Total Science Is Like A Field Of Force Whose Boundary Conditions Are Experience.

Geography And History

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.

To Be Is To Be The Value Of A Variable.

To Define An Expression Is, Paradoxically Speaking, To Explain How To Get Along Without It. To Define Is To Eliminate.

Implication Is Thus The Very Texture Of Our Web Of Belief, And Logic Is The Theory That Traces It.

One Man's Antinomy Is Another Man's Falsidical Paradox, Give Or Take A Couple Of Thousand Years.

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.

Wyman's Overpopulated Universe Is In Many Ways Unlovely. It Offends The Aesthetic Sense Of Us Who Have A Taste For Desert Landscapes.

Our Argument Is Not Flatly Circular, But Something Like It. It Has The Form, Figuratively Speaking, Of A Closed Curve In Space.

Science Is Not A Substitute For Common Sense, But An Extension Of It.

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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A Curious Thing About The Ontological Problem Is Its Simplicity. It Can Be Put Into Three Anglo-saxon Monosyllables: 'what Is There?' It Can Be Answered, Moreover, In A Word--'everything'--and Everyone Will Accept This Answer As True.

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English General And Singular Terms, Identity, Quantification, And The Whole Bag Of Ontological Tricks May Be Correlated With Elements Of The Native Language In Any Of Various Mutually Incompatible Ways, Each Compatible With All Possible Linguistic Data, And None Preferable To Another Save As Favored By A Rationalization Of The Native Language That Is Simple And Natural To Us.

Native Language

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Students Of The Heavens Are Separable Into Astronomers And Astrologers As Readily As The Minor Domestic Ruminants Into Sheep And Goats, But The Separation Of Philosophers Into Sages And Cranks Seems To Be More Sensitive To Frames Of Reference.

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Language Is Conceived In Sin And Science Is Its Redemption.

Life Is What The Least Of Us Make The Most Of Us Feel The Least Of Us Make The Most Of.

Yields Falsehood When Preceded By Its Quotation.

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Irrefragability, Thy Name Is Mathematics.

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

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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.

Physics Investigates The Essential Nature Of The World, And Biology Describes A Local Bump. Psychology, Human Psychology, Describes A Bump On The Bump.

Theory May Be Deliberate, As In A Chapter On Chemistry, Or It May Be Second Nature, As In The Immemorial Doctrine Of Ordinary Enduring Middle-sized Physical Objects.

The Word 'definition' Has Come To Have A Dangerously Reassuring Sound, Owing No Doubt To Its Frequent Occurrence In Logical And Mathematical Writings.

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The Scientist Is Indistinguishable From The Common Man In His Sense Of Evidence, Except That The Scientist Is More Careful.

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The Line That I Am Urging As Today's Conventional Wisdom Is Not A Denial Of Consciousness. It Is Often Called, With More Reason, Arepudiation Of Mind. It Is Indeed A Repudiation Of Mind As A Second Substance, Over And Above Body. It Can Be Described Less Harshly As An Identification Of Mind With Some Of The Faculties, States, And Activities Of The Body. Mental States And Events Are A Special Subclass Of The States And Events Of The Human Or Animal Body.

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... 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.

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We Can Applaud The State Lottery As A Public Subsidy Of Intelligence, For It Yields Public Income That Is Calculated To Lighten The Tax Burden Of Us Prudent Abstainers At The Expense Of The Benighted Masses Of Wishful Thinkers.

One Man's Observation Is Another Man's Closed Book Or Flight Of Fancy.

To Call A Posit A Posit Is Not To Patronize It. A Posit Can Be Unavoidable Except At The Cost Of Other No Less Artificial Expedients. Everything To Which We Concede Existence Is A Posit From The Standpoint Of A Description Of The Theory-building Process, And Simultaneously Real From The Standpoint Of The Theory That Is Being Built.

Our Talk Of External Things, Our Very Notion Of Things, Is Just A Conceptual Apparatus That Helps Us To Foresee And Control The Triggerings Of Our Sensory Receptors In The Light Of Previous Triggering Of Our Sensory Receptors.

Scientific Method Is The Way To Truth, But It Affords, Even In Principle, No Unique Definition Of Truth. Any So-called Pragmatic Definition Of Truth Is Doomed To Failure Equally.

My Position Is A Naturalistic One; I See Philosophy Not As An A Priori Propaedeutic Or Groundwork For Science, But As Continuous With Science. I See Philosophy And Science As In The Same Boat--a Boat Which, To Revert To Neurath's Figure As I So Often Do, We Can Rebuild Only At Sea While Staying Afloat In It. There Is No External Vantage Point, No First Philosophy.

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.

How Are We To Adjudicate Among Rival Ontologies? Certainly The Answer Is Not Provided By The Semantical Formula "to Be Is To Be The Value Of A Variable"; This Formula Serves Rather, Conversely, In Testing The Conformity Of A Given Remark Or Doctrine To A Prior Ontological Standard.

Necessity Resides In The Way We Talk About Things, Not In The Things We Talk About.

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

The Variables Of Quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' Range Over Our Whole Ontology, Whatever It May Be; And We Are Convicted Of A Particular Ontological Presupposition If, And Only If, The Alleged Presuppositum Has To Be Reckoned Among The Entities Over Which Our Variables Range In Order To Render One Of Our Affirmations True.

Logic Is An Old Subject, And Since 1879 It Has Been A Great One.

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