The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliber...ate 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?...' It can be answered, moveover, in a word--'Everything.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic ...statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism.... Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, b...it by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in anoth...er.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is t...o change the labels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »