WVO Quine
Boston
29 May 1990

"The world around us pelts our nerve endings with light rays and molecules, triggering sensations. Growing up in a garrulous society, we learn to associate patterns of these sensations with words and patterns of these words with further words until we reach the point somehow of talking about objects in the world around us.
We come to talk of animals, plants, planets, galaxies and also of the nerve endings themselves, the light rays and molecules. We talk of immaterial things too: numbers, classes and properties. I have sought a clearer view of the connections, logical and casual, between stimulation, language, and the natural world that language purports to describe. I have sought a clearer notion of why natural science turns out under experiment to be so largely true, and how much of it is imposed by man and how much by nature."