Logic Chases Truth Up The Tree Of

Our Talk Of External Things, Our Very Notion Of Things, Is Just A Conceptual Apparatus That Helps Us To Foresee And Control The Triggerings Of Our Sensory Receptors In The Light Of Previous Triggering Of Our Sensory Receptors.

The Variables Of Quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' Range Over Our Whole Ontology, Whatever It May Be; And We Are Convicted Of A Particular Ontological Presupposition If, And Only If, The Alleged Presuppositum Has To Be Reckoned Among The Entities Over Which Our Variables Range In Order To Render One Of Our Affirmations True.

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.

For Me The Problem Of Induction Is A Problem About The World: A Problem Of How We, As We Are Now (by Our Present Scientific Lights), In A World We Never Made, Should Stand Better Than Random, Or Coin-tossing Chances Changes Of Coming Out Right When We Predict By Inductions. . . .

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