Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes about Science

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Science, Common Sense, Substitutes

Willard Van Orman Quine (1976). “The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays”, p.229, Harvard University Press

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

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science, Men, Common

Willard Van Orman Quine (1976). “The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays”, p.233, Harvard University Press

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.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Truth, Science, Unique

Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia Smith Churchland, Dagfinn Follesdal (2013). “Word and Object”, p.21, MIT Press

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.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science, Sheep, Heaven

Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Truth, Science, Judging

Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia S. Churchland, Dagfinn Føllesdal (2013). “Word and Object”, p.22, MIT Press

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Nature, Science, Psychology

W. V. Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine (1981). “Theories and Things”, p.93, Harvard University Press