Life Is What The Least Of Us

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.

To Define An Expression Is, Paradoxically Speaking, To Explain How To Get Along Without It. To Define Is To Eliminate.

My Position Is A Naturalistic One; I See Philosophy Not As An A Priori Propaedeutic Or Groundwork For Science, But As Continuous With Science. I See Philosophy And Science As In The Same Boat--a Boat Which, To Revert To Neurath's Figure As I So Often Do, We Can Rebuild Only At Sea While Staying Afloat In It. There Is No External Vantage Point, No First Philosophy.

Meaning Is What Essence Becomes When It Is Divorced From The Object Of Reference And Wedded To The Word.

... Two Men Could Be Just Alike In All Their Dispositions To Verbal Behavior Under All Possible Sensory Stimulations, And Yet Themeanings Or Ideas Expressed In Their Identically Triggered And Identically Sounding Utterances Could Diverge Radically, For The Two Men, In A Wide Range Of Cases.