Scientific Method Is The Way To Truth,

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.

Confusion Of Sign And Object Is Original Sin Coeval With The Word.

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.

The Lore Of Our Fathers Is A Fabric Of Sentences. In Our Hands It Develops And Changes, Through More Or Less Arbitrary And Deliberate Revisions And Additions Of Our Own, More Or Less Directly Occasioned By The Continuing Stimulation Of Our Sense Organs. It Is A Pale Gray Lore, Black With Fact And White With Convention. But I Have Found No Substantial Reasons For Concluding That There Are Any Quite Black Threads In It, Or Any White Ones.

To Call A Posit A Posit Is Not To Patronize It. A Posit Can Be Unavoidable Except At The Cost Of Other No Less Artificial Expedients. Everything To Which We Concede Existence Is A Posit From The Standpoint Of A Description Of The Theory-building Process, And Simultaneously Real From The Standpoint Of The Theory That Is Being Built.