Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
Willard Van Orman QuineRead
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the inherent difficulty in understanding the relationship between language and reality.
Willard Van Orman Quine's quote suggests that the confusion between symbols (signs) and what they represent (objects) is a fundamental issue that has existed since language originated. This confusion can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations in communication and thought, as the essence of what we intend to convey often gets lost in translation through the words we choose.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion on the nature of language, you might cite this quote to emphasize the complexities of interpretation.
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.
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. . . .
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The Three-Fifths Compromise was the creation of a punitive national unity at the expense of black people's basic humanity.
It is never on account of its formal nature as a psychic act that faith is conceived in Scripture to be saving. It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or nature of faith, but in the object of faith.
The world being unworthy to receive the Son of God directly from the hands of the Father, he gave his Son to Mary for the world to receive him from her.
When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it.
We would like to see you departing peacefully.
In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
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