Confirmation holism

Confirmation holism, also called the Quine-Duhem thesis (after philosophers Willard Van Orman Quine and Pierre Duhem), is the claim a scientific theory cannot be tested in isolation; a test of one theory always depends on other theories and hypotheses.

The indeterminacy of a theory by evidence

Similarly, a theory consists of some indeterminate conjunction of hypotheses,

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:T equiv left( h_1 wedge h_2 wedge h_3 cdots wedge h_n ight)

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and so

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:sim T equiv sim left( h_1 wedge h_2 wedge h_3 cdots wedge h_n ight)

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which implies that

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:sim left( h_1 wedge h_2 wedge h_3 cdots wedge h_n ight) equiv left( sim h_1 ee sim h_2 ee sim h_3 cdots ee sim h_n ight)

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In words, the failure of some theory implies the failure of at least one of its underlying hypotheses. It is always possible to resurrect a falsified theory by claiming that only one of its underlying hypotheses is false; again, since there are an indeterminate number of such hypotheses, any theory can potentially be made compatible with any particular observation. Therefore it is in principle impossible to determine if a theory is false by reference to evidence.

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