Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes About Belief

• Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

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  Willard Van Orman Quine

  "The web of belief". Book by Willard Van Orman Quine, 1970.

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• 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.

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  Willard Van Orman Quine

  "Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine".

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• 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.

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  Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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