We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

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.

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...

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more...

One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.

Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim...

‘Ouch’ is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.

Language is a social art.

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor,...

To be is to be the value of a variable.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation...

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.