Confusion Of Sign And Object

To Call A Posit A Posit Is Not To Patronize It. A Posit Can Be Unavoidable Except At The Cost Of Other No Less Artificial Expedients. Everything To Which We Concede Existence Is A Posit From The Standpoint Of A Description Of The Theory-building Process, And Simultaneously Real From The Standpoint Of The Theory That Is Being Built.

Unscientific Man Is Beset By A Deplorable Desire To Have Been Right. The Scientist Is Distinguished By A Desire To Be Right.

Our Acceptance Of An Ontology Is, I Think, Similar In Principle To Our Acceptance Of A Scientific Theory, Say A System Of Physics;we Adopt, At Least Insofar As We Are Reasonable, The Simplest Conceptual Scheme Into Which The Disordered Fragments Of Raw Experience Can Be Fitted And Arranged.

If There Is A Case For Mental Events And Mental States, It Must Be That The Positing Of Them, Like The Positing Of Molecules, Hassome Indirect Systematic Efficacy In The Development Of Theory.

English General And Singular Terms, Identity, Quantification, And The Whole Bag Of Ontological Tricks May Be Correlated With Elements Of The Native Language In Any Of Various Mutually Incompatible Ways, Each Compatible With All Possible Linguistic Data, And None Preferable To Another Save As Favored By A Rationalization Of The Native Language That Is Simple And Natural To Us.