Tradition

Confirmation holism

Overview

In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, or epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims.

Duhem's idea was roughly that no theory of any type can be tested in isolation, rather only when embedded in a background of other hypotheses, e.g. hypotheses about initial conditions. Quine thought that this background involved not only such hypotheses but also our whole web of belief, which, among other things, includes our mathematical and logical theories and our scientific theories. This last claim is sometimes known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.

A related claim made by Quine, though contested by some (see Adolf Grünbaum 1962), is that one can always protect one's theory against refutation by attributing failure to some other part of our web of belief. In his own words, "Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system."

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies, and which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as constituting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the sort of object or material which has place and significance only in one of the serial functional situations of experience, over against the active…
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
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The determinations of a substance, which are only particular modes of its existence, are called accidents. They are always real, because they concern the existence of substance (negations are only determinations, which express the non-existence of something in the substance). Now, if to this real in the substance we ascribe a particular existence (for example, to motion as an accident of matter), this existence is…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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An attempt to treat this subject comprehensively would be a transgression of the bounds prescribed to this work, since it would necessitate the inquiry which, more than any other, is the grand question of what is called metaphysics, viz., What are the propositions which may reasonably be received without proof? That there must be some such propositions all are agreed, since there can not be an infinite series of…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Confirmation holism is.
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Philosophers who discussed Confirmation holism

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