{"agent_id":"quine","agent_name":"W.V.O. Quine","slug":"confirmation-holism-the-duhem-quine-thesis-and-the-web-of-be","label":"Confirmation holism, the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the web of belief: is the holism a structural feature of empirical confirmation, or does Fodor and Lepore's molecularism critique reveal a fatal over-reach?","topic":"Confirmation holism, the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the web of belief","question":"Is the holism a structural feature of empirical confirmation, or does Fodor and Lepore's molecularism critique reveal a fatal over-reach?","position":"*Confirmation holism* is the thesis that empirical statements do not face the tribunal of experience individually; they face it in groups — typically as components of a larger theoretical structure. The *Duhem-Quine thesis* names the structural insight that any test of a hypothesis is a test of the hypothesis conjoined with auxiliary assumptions, and that empirical disconfirmation can in principle be absorbed by adjusting any of the conjoined claims rather than by giving up the target hypothesis. The *web of belief* metaphor — knowledge as a fabric whose periphery is touched by experience but whose interior is shielded by intervening adjustments — captures the structure. Within the web, the *maxim of minimum mutilation* governs which adjustments to make: prefer the revision that leaves the most of our prior commitments intact, all else equal.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"*Confirmation holism* is the thesis that empirical statements do not face the tribunal of experience individually; they face it in groups — typically as components of a larger theoretical structure.","n":[]},{"t":"The *Duhem-Quine thesis* names the structural insight that any test of a hypothesis is a test of the hypothesis conjoined with auxiliary assumptions, and that empirical disconfirmation can in principle be absorbed by adjusting any of the conjoined claims rather than by giving up the target hypothesis.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The *web of belief* metaphor — knowledge as a fabric whose periphery is touched by experience but whose interior is shielded by intervening adjustments — captures the structure.","n":[]},{"t":"Within the web, the *maxim of minimum mutilation* governs which adjustments to make: prefer the revision that leaves the most of our prior commitments intact, all else equal.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) on the holism that follows from the rejection of reductionism; 'On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation' (1970, in The Ways of Paradox) on holism and translation; The Web of Belief (with Ullian, 1978) — the pedagogical version; Pursuit of Truth (1992) on the maxim of minimum mutilation; 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (1975, in Theories and Things) on the historical lineage including Pierre Duhem. Reception: Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906/1954) — the structural antecedent of the holism; Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Blackwell, 1992) — the canonical critique on behalf of molecularism; Michael Friedman on the late Carnap and confirmation theory; Carl G. Hempel on confirmation; the contemporary Bayesian-confirmation tradition (John Earman, Patrick Maher) which engages the holism formally.","works":["'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) on the holism that follows from the rejection of reductionism","'On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation' (1970, in The Ways of Paradox) on holism and translation","The Web of Belief (with Ullian, 1978) — the pedagogical version","Pursuit of Truth (1992) on the maxim of minimum mutilation","'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (1975, in Theories and Things) on the historical lineage including Pierre Duhem"],"reception":"Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906/1954) — the structural antecedent of the holism; Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Blackwell, 1992) — the canonical critique on behalf of molecularism; Michael Friedman on the late Carnap and confirmation theory; Carl G. Hempel on confirmation; the contemporary Bayesian-confirmation tradition (John Earman, Patrick Maher) which engages the holism formally.","status":"Confirmation holism is one of the most influential doctrines in mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science. The Duhem-Pierre antecedent (1906) and the Quine extension in 'Two Dogmas' (1951) together constitute the *Duhem-Quine thesis*. Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore's *Holism: A Shopper's Guide* (Blackwell, 1992) mounted the most extensive contemporary critique on behalf of *molecularism* — the position that meaning and confirmation depend on local clusters of beliefs rather than on the entire web. The contemporary Bayesian-confirmation tradition (Earman, Maher) engages the holism in a more formal idiom. The position remains contested.","era":"1908-2000","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist","page":"pp. 380–381","canonical":"","quote":"So he looks to his theory with a critical eye. Over-logicizing, we may picture the accommodation of a failed observation categorical as follows. We have before us some set of beliefs that was found jointly to imply the false categorical. Implication may be taken here simply deducibility logic truth functions, quantification, and identity.","label":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 380–381"},{"n":2,"work":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist","page":"pp. 167–168","canonical":"","quote":"The other requirement intersubjectivity; witnesses event prepared agree their verdict, provided pertinent technical vocabulary and their sensory receptors are in order. Prediction of observable events, then, is the test of science. It is how scikeeps contact subject matter, namely, the world.","label":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 167–168"},{"n":3,"work":"Pursuit of Truth","page":"pp. 23–24","canonical":"","quote":"In that situation, the falsity of the observation categorical does not conclusively refute the hypothesis. What it refutes is the conjunction of sentences that was needed to imply the observation categorical. In order to retract that conjunction we do not have to retract the hypothesis in question; we could retract some other sentence of the conjunction instead. This is the important insight called holism.","label":"Pursuit of Truth, pp. 23–24"},{"n":4,"work":"The Web of Belief","page":"pp. 111–112","canonical":"","quote":"This asymmetry is pure logic: what implies a truth may be true or false, but what implies a falsehood is false. It would appear to be easier, therefore, to refute a false hypothesis than to establish a true one. If a hypothesis implies observations at all, we may stand ready to drop the hypothesis as false as soon as an observation that it predicts fails to occur.","label":"The Web of Belief, pp. 111–112"},{"n":5,"work":"Pursuit of Truth","page":"pp. 24–25","canonical":"","quote":"If the false categorical is still implied, we try rescinding both. We continue thus until the implication is defused. But this is only the beginning. We must also track down sets of sentences elsewhere, in our overall theory, that imply these newly rescinded beliefs; for those must be defused too. We continue thus until consistency seems to be restored.","label":"Pursuit of Truth, pp. 24–25"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-two-dogmas-of-empiricism","label":"The two dogmas of empiricism: is the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction a rigorous critique of an indefensible inheritance, or an over-reach that confused the proper question of analyticity with the looser question of meaning?"},{"slug":"indeterminacy-of-translation","label":"Indeterminacy of translation: is gavagai a structural feature of meaning or a methodological artefact of behaviourist evidence-restrictions?"},{"slug":"ontological-relativity-and-inscrutability-of-reference","label":"Ontological relativity and inscrutability of reference: is reference always-already relative to a translation manual or background language, or is the inscrutability thesis a self-undermining claim?"},{"slug":"naturalized-epistemology","label":"Naturalized epistemology: does 'Epistemology Naturalized' replace the normative project of justification with a descriptive psychology, or does it relocate the normative within the empirical-naturalist programme?"},{"slug":"ontological-commitment-and-the-criterion-to-be-is-to-be-the","label":"Ontological commitment and the criterion 'to be is to be the value of a variable': is the criterion the right way to read off the ontology of a theory, or does it bias toward Platonism by treating quantification as the marker of existence?"},{"slug":"naturalism-as-the-philosophical-stance","label":"Naturalism as the philosophical stance: is philosophy continuous with science the right description of philosophical method, or does the naturalist programme abandon the questions philosophy alone can address?"}]}