Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Language is a social art.
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
To be is to be the value of a variable.
Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.
The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.
Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
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.
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
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.
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.
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.
Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.
Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .
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.
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.