Entities

Famous quotes containing the word entities:

    Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be ‘observed’ are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
    [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.
    Ian Hacking (b. 1936)

    What are you now? If we could touch one another,
    if these our separate entities could come to grips,
    clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
    I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
    and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
    Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.
    Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)

    The variables of quantification, ‘something,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘everything,’ range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)