ellauri096.html on line 98: Quine is alluding to Rudolf Carnap’s (1950) generalization that scientists replace qualitative terms (tall) with comparatives (taller than) and then replace the comparatives with quantitative terms (being n millimeters in height).
ellauri096.html on line 112: Agnostics overestimate how easy it is to identify what cannot be known. To know, one need only find a single proof. To know that there is no way to know, one must prove the negative generalization that there is no proof. After all, inability to imagine a proof is commonly due to a failure of ingenuity rather than the non-existence of a proof. In addition to being a more general proposition, a proof of unknowability requires epistemological premises about what constitutes proof. Consequently, meta-proof (proof about proofs) is even more demanding than proof.
ellauri096.html on line 231: An apparent counterexample can be set aside as anomaly if it conflicts with a highly confirmed law of nature. But if the counterexample only conflicts with a speculative generalization, the theory should be rejected.
ellauri096.html on line 245: The common explanation of Moore’s absurdity is that the speaker has managed to contradict himself without uttering a contradiction. So the sentence is odd because it is a counterexample to the generalization that anyone who contradicts himself utters a contradiction.
ellauri107.html on line 154: "Philosophical generalization is completely alien to me—some other writer’s work. I’m a philosophical illiterate." Yep, his philosophy was solipsistic semitism. He had no need to read about it, he wrote the books.
ellauri299.html on line 156: Anie: After 130 pages of preaching, with no plot in sight, I gave up. This book is so full of platitudes, generalizations, and simplistic solutions that it belongs in the harlequin category. There are too many good books with great plots out there to waste any more time on this book.
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