Orman

Famous quotes containing the word orman:

    The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)