I Have Been Accused Of Denying Consciousness

Confusion Of Sign And Object Is Original Sin Coeval With The Word.

Necessity Resides In The Way We Talk About Things, Not In The Things We Talk About.

Linguistically, And Hence Conceptually, The Things In Sharpest Focus Are The Things That Are Public Enough To Be Talked Of Publicly, Common And Conspicuous Enough To Be Talked Of Often, And Near Enough To Sense To Be Quickly Identified And Learned By Name; It Is To These That Words Apply First And Foremost.

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.

A Curious Thing About The Ontological Problem Is Its Simplicity. It Can Be Put Into Three Anglo-saxon Monosyllables: 'what Is There?' It Can Be Answered, Moreover, In A Word--'everything'--and Everyone Will Accept This Answer As True.