Confusion Of Sign And Object Is Original

Unscientific Man Is Beset By A Deplorable Desire To Have Been Right. The Scientist Is Distinguished By A Desire To Be Right.

The Variables Of Quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' Range Over Our Whole Ontology, Whatever It May Be; And We Are Convicted Of A Particular Ontological Presupposition If, And Only If, The Alleged Presuppositum Has To Be Reckoned Among The Entities Over Which Our Variables Range In Order To Render One Of Our Affirmations True.

English 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.

Language Is A Social Art.

Physical Objects Are Conceptually Imported Into The Situation As Convenient Intermediaries Not By Definition In Terms Of Experience, But Simply As Irreducible Posits Comparable, Epistemologically, To The Gods Of Homer . . . For My Part I Do, Qua Lay Physicist, Believe In Physical Objects And Not In Homer's Gods; And I Consider It A Scientific Error To Believe Otherwise. But In Point Of Epistemological Footing, The Physical Objects And The Gods Differ Only In Degree And Not In Kind. Both Sorts Of Entities Enter Our Conceptions Only As Cultural Posits.