To Define An Expression Is, Paradoxically Speaking,

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.

The Strategy Of Semantic Ascent Is That It Carries The Discussion Into A Domain Where Both Parties Are Better Agreed On The Objects (viz., Words) And On The Main Terms Connecting Them. Words, Or Their Inscriptions, Unlike Points, Miles, Classes And The Rest, Are Tangible Objects Of The Size So Popular In The Marketplace, Where Men Of Unlike Conceptual Schemes Communicate At Their Best. The Strategy Is One Of Ascending To A Common Part Of Two Fundamentally Disparate Conceptual Schemes, The Better To Discuss The Disparate Foundations. No Wonder It Helps In Philosophy.

The Three Main Medieval Points Of View Regarding Universals Are Designated By Historians As Realism, Conceptualism, And Nominalism. Essentially These Same Three Doctrines Reappear In Twentieth-century Surveys Of The Philosophy Of Mathematics Under The New Names Logicism, Intuitionism, And Formalism.

Scientific Method Is The Way To Truth, But It Affords, Even In Principle, No Unique Definition Of Truth. Any So-called Pragmatic Definition Of Truth Is Doomed To Failure Equally.

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