Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.

For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

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

No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.

Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.