Willard Van Orman Quine

"Meaning supervenes on physical fact plus history plus context."

"Ontology is cheap; all theories can be made equivalent through paraphrase."

"We accept scientific theories because they work, not because they're true."

"The self is a theoretical posit, no more and no less."

"Language learning depends on analogy and imitation, not innate rules."

"Propensities and dispositions play irreducible roles in our theories."

"Reality is not language-independent but language-schema-dependent."

"The web of belief extends from sensory periphery to theoretical core."

"Extensionality in logic masks intensional phenomena in language."

"Nominalism captures our metaphysical intuitions without abstract objects."

"Scientific explanation reduces the complex to the simple through iteration."

"Identity and indiscernibility are not always equivalent."

"The world divides into objects only relative to a conceptual scheme."

"Logical truth emerges from linguistic convention, not metaphysical necessity."

"The structure of language constrains the structure of thought."

"Abstract singular terms commit us to abstract singular objects."

"Necessity is relative to a background theory or framework."

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges."

"If belief in mathematics is not a religious belief, then there is no such thing as a religious belief."

"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually thinking of an issue about which you care nothing."

"Ontology recapitulates methodology; the nature of being follows from our methods of inquiry."

"We are prisoners caught in the framework of our language."

"Questions of nomenclature are in a real sense meaningless; the vocabulary we adopt is in the last analysis an arbitrary matter."

"There is an important lesson in the fact that modern logic cannot exclude the law of excluded middle."

"The appeal to the world is there when we begin by questioning the ground of our knowledge."

"Every statement can be translated into a statement about sensory events."

"Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries."

"The notion of a necessary condition is less clear than that of a sufficient condition."

"Language is a social art."

"The verb 'to be' has two main uses: the predicative and the identity use."