Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Science is not wisdom.

Fundamentally, I have no idea how the world works, though I am trying to figure it out.

Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

Science is uncertain.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.