Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes About Language
-
Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.
→ -
Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
→ -
English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
→ -
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
→ -
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
→ -
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
→ -
We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
→ -
The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
→ -
The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.
→ -
Language is a social art.
→ -
Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.
→
Willard Van Orman Quine
- Born: June 25, 1908
- Died: December 25, 2000
- Occupation: Philosopher
Related Authors
-
Pierre Duhem Philosopher -
Nelson Goodman Philosopher -
Hilary Putnam Philosopher -
Rudolf Carnap Philosopher -
Wilfrid Sellars Philosopher -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
David Hume Philosopher -
Gottlob Frege Mathematician -
John Dewey Philosopher -
Saul Kripke Philosopher -
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosopher -
Karl Popper Philosopher -
Richard Rorty Philosopher -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Donald Davidson Philosopher -
Alfred Tarski Logician -
Thomas Kuhn Physicist -
Charles Sanders Peirce Philosopher -
Michael Dummett Philosopher