It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.