Zitate von Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine
25.6. 1908 Akron (Ohio) – 2000 –

Quine –

Rezension: The Web of Belief

"There is nothing we can be more confident of than external things—some of them, anyway—other people, sticks, stones." – "Things and Their Places in Theories", in: Theories and Things, S. 2

"... 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, S.4

"It is in the light of the full body of our beliefs that candidates gain acceptance or rejection ..."
The Web of Belief, S. 16

"The beliefs face the tribunal of observation not singly but in a body." The Web of Belief, S. 22

"... observation is the tug that tows the ship of theory." The Web of Belief, S. 29

"Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it."
The Web of Belief, S. 41

"The answer is naturalism: the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described." ... "Epistemology, for me, or what comes nearest to it, is the study of how animals can have contrives that very science, given just that sketchy neural input." Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass. 1999, S. 22

"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind." "Natural Kind" in Ontological Relativity & Other Essays, S. 126
Kreaturen, die mit ihren Induktionen hartnäckig daneben liegen, unterliegen der traurigen aber löblichen Tendenz auszusterben, bevor sie ihre Art fortpflanzen.

"Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system."
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in: From a Logical Point of View, 43, revised 1961
Jede Aussage kann als wahr angesehen werden, egal was kommt, wenn man genügend drastische Anpassungen an anderen Stellen im System macht.

"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."
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in: From a Logical Point of View, 44, revised 1961

"The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples."
Die vertrauten Gegenstände mögen nicht die gesamte Wirklichkeit ausmachen, doch sie sind ausgezeichnete Beispiele dafür.
Word and Object, 3
"The tail thus comes, in an extremity, to wag the dog."
Im äußersten Fall wedelt der Schwanz mit dem Hund
Word and Object, 19

"The philosopher's task differs from the others', then, in detail; but in no such drastic way as those suppose who imagine for the philosopher a vantage point outside the conceptual scheme that he takes in charge. There is no such cosmic exile. He cannot study and revise the fundamental conceptual scheme of science and common sense without having some conceptual scheme, whether the same or another no less in need of philosophical scrutiny, in which to work. He can scrutinize and improve the system from within, appealing to coherence and simplicity; but this is the theoretician's method generally." Word and Object, 275-76; Hervorhebung H.H.; vergleiche:

Zitate von Keith Lehrer

"...I hold that knowledge, mind and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy."
"Language is a social art which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people's overt behavior under publicly recognizable circumstances."
"The copy theory in its various forms stands closer to the main philosophical tradition, and to the attitude of common sense today. Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the world are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels."
Ontological Relativity 1969

"Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural sciene." Epistemology Naturalized 1969

"Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 is has been a great one."
Methods of Logic. New York 1950. 1879 erschien

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