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21 " To mention Boston we use 'Boston' or a synonym, and to mention 'Boston' we use ' 'Boston' ' or a synonym. ' 'Boston' ' contains six letters and just one pair of quotation marks; 'Boston' contains six letters and no quotation marks; and Boston contains some 800,000 people. "
― Willard Van Orman Quine , Mathematical Logic
22 " Philosophy of science is philosophy enough. "
― Willard Van Orman Quine
23 " Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. "
24 " It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it. "
25 " How many possible men are there in that doorway? "
― Willard Van Orman Quine ,
26 " We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. "
27 " We may […] view set theory, and mathematics generally, in much the way in which we view theoretical portions of the natural sciences themselves; as comprising truths or hypotheses "
28 " The student who majors in philosophy primarily for spiritual comfort is misguided and probably not a very good student anyway, since intellectual curiosity is not what moves him. "
29 " Mathematicians attain precision because of the abstractness of their objects, and they confuse sign and object for the same reason. Physical things are palpably unlike their names; numbers and other mathematical objects, however, are not even palpable. "
30 " Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. "
31 " The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. "
32 " Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when. "
― Willard Van Orman Quine , Word and Object