Quine

Famous quotes containing the word quine:

    ‘Ouch’ is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation 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.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    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.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)