Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

Scientists don't read theology; they don't read philosophy. It doesn't make any difference to what they're doing - for better or worse, it may not be a value judgment, but it's true.

There was a time when 'science' meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge through experimentation and observation. But it's rapidly becoming a synonym for progressive politics and materialist philosophy.

One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. ... If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.

The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.