... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.
Willard Van Orman QuineThe three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Willard Van Orman QuineMeaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Willard Van Orman QuineTheory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.
Willard Van Orman QuineI have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman QuineEnglish general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
Willard Van Orman Quine