Language Is A Social Art.

We Must Not Leap To The Fatalistic Conclusion That We Are Stuck With The Conceptual Scheme That We Grew Up In. We Can Change It, Bit By Bit, Plank By Plank, Though Meanwhile There Is Nothing To Carry Us Along But The Evolving Conceptual Scheme Itself. The Philosopher's Task Was Well Compared By Neurath To That Of A Mariner Who Must Rebuild His Ship On The Open Sea.

Some May Find Comfort In Reflecting That The Distinction Between An Eliminative And An Explicative Physicalism Is Unreal.

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.

Some Have Said That The Thesis [of Indeterminacy] Is A Consequence Of My Behaviorism. Some Have Said That It Is A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of My Behaviorism. I Disagree With This Second Point, But I Agree With The First. I Hold Further That The Behaviorism Approach Is Mandatory. In Psychology One May Or May Not Be A Behaviorist, But In Linguistics One Has No Choice.

We Do Not Learn First What To Talk About And Then What To Say About It.