Willard Van Orman Quine Men Quotations

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

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.

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

... 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.

One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest lawsof 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.