How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.
Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.
No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.
A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.
Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.
Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.
Set theory in sheep's clothing.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.
Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.
Language is a social art.