I Have Been Accused Of Denying Consciousness

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.

Different Persons Growing Up In The Same Language Are Like Different Bushes Trimmed And Trained To Take The Shape Of Identical Elephants. The Anatomical Details Of Twigs And Branches Will Fulfill The Elephantine Form Differently From Bush To Bush, But The Overall Outward Results Are Alike.

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 Primordial Urge In The Murky Wastes Of Time.

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 Part I Do, Qua Lay Physicist, Believe In Physical Objects And Not In Homer's Gods; And I Consider It A Scientific Error To Believe Otherwise. But In Point Of Epistemological Footing, The Physical Objects And The Gods Differ Only In Degree And Not In Kind. Both Sorts Of Entities Enter Our Conceptions Only As Cultural Posits.

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.