Willard Van Orman Quine

"The web of belief anchors itself in sensory experience."

"Intentionality emerges from the structure of our theories."

"Words get their meaning from their role in language games."

"Existence claims are existential quantifications in formal logic."

"The verification principle undermines its own status."

"Context and convention determine how we parse sentences."

"Abstract objects populate our theories because of mathematical convenience."

"The structure of reality may be multiply realizable."

"Sense and reference diverge in systematic ways."

"Rival frameworks may be intertranslatable but equally valid."

"Knowledge is justified true belief—or so it seemed to tradition."

"The world as described is relative to a description."

"Epistemology without psychology is epistemology without content."

"Pragmatism teaches us to seek the consequences, not the essence."

"Objects persist through change by virtue of our conceptual schemes."

"Properties are abstractions we impose on the plenum of reality."

"Language is not a mirror of nature but a tool for navigating it."

"The indispensability of abstract objects argues for their existence."

"Truth is what science asymptotically approaches."

"Observation statements are laden with theory from the ground up."

"Relative identity is intelligible only within a sortal framework."

"The fundamental equation of semantics relates words to things."

"Essentialism persists because our language evolved to encode it."

"Mathematical objects enjoy a peculiar kind of existence."

"The problem of universals dissolves when we adopt nominalism."

"Stimulus meaning is poor in content but rich in inference."

"Scientific realism must accommodate underdetermination."

"Dispositions are real but not reducible to categorical properties."

"Concepts carve reality only as finely as our purposes require."

"The logic of quantification reveals our deepest metaphysical views."