Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes About Mathematics

• The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Men, Geography And History, Fabric

  "Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine".

• Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Names, Mathematics

  Willard Van Orman Quine (1976). “The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays”, p.22, Harvard University Press

• Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Math, Numbers, Law

• The 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 Quine

  Philosophy, Reality, Views

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