Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes About Physics

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

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  Willard Van Orman Quine

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

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• 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.

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  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Roger F. Gibson (2004). “Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine”, p.190, Harvard University Press

  1855

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