Confirmation holism - Wikipedia Confirmation holism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, also called 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 so. 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.[1][2] Duhem's idea was, roughly, that no theory of any type can be tested in isolation but 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.[3] A related claim made by Quine, though contested by some (see Adolf Grünbaum 1962),[4] 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."[5] Contents 1 Underdetermination in physical theory 2 Total vs. partial holism 3 See also 4 References Underdetermination in physical theory[edit] By 1845 astronomers found that the orbit of planet Uranus around the Sun departed from expectations. Not concluding that Newton's law of universal gravitation was flawed, however, astronomers John Couch Adams as well as Urbain Le Verrier independently predicted a new planet, eventually known as Neptune, and even calculated its weight and orbit through Newton's theory.[citation needed] And yet neither did this empirical success of Newton's theory verify Newton's theory. Le Verrier soon reported that Mercury's perihelion—the peak of its orbital ellipse nearest to the Sun—advanced each time Mercury completed an orbit, a phenomenon not predicted by Newton's theory, which astrophysicists were so confident in that they predicted a new planet, named Vulcan, which a number of astronomers subsequently claimed to have seen. In 1905, however, Einstein's special theory of relativity claimed that space and time are both relative, refuting the very framework of Newton's theory that claimed that space and time were both absolute. In 1915, Einstein's general theory of relativity newly explained gravitation while precisely predicting Mercury's orbit. In 1919, astrophysicist Arthur Eddington led an expedition to test Einstein's prediction of the Sun's mass reshaping spacetime in its vicinity. The Royal Society announced confirmation—accepted by physicists as the fall of Newton's theory. Yet few theoretical physicists believe general relativity is a fundamentally accurate description of gravitation, and instead seek a theory of quantum gravity.[6] [7][citation needed] Total vs. partial holism[edit] Some scholars, like Quine, argue that if a prediction that a theory makes comes out true, then the corresponding piece of evidence confirms the whole theory and even the whole framework within which that theory is embedded. Some have questioned this radical or total form of confirmational holism. If total holism were true, they argue, that would lead to absurd consequences like the confirmation of arbitrary conjunctions. For example, if the general theory of relativity is confirmed by the perihelion of Mercury then, according to total holism, the conjunction of the general theory of relativity with the claim that the moon is made of cheese also gets confirmed. More controversially, the two conjuncts are meant to be confirmed in equal measure. The critics of total holism do not deny that evidence may spread its support far and wide. Rather, they deny that it always spreads its support to the whole of any theory or theoretical framework that entails or probabilistically predicts the evidence. This view is known as partial holism. One early advocate of partial confirmational holism is Adolf Grünbaum (1962).[4] Another is Ken Gemes (1993).[8] The latter provides refinements to the hypothetico-deductive account of confirmation, arguing that a piece of evidence may be confirmationally relevant only to some content parts of a hypothesis. More recently, and in a similar vein, Ioannis Votsis (2014)[9] argues for an objectivist account of confirmation, according to which, monstrous hypotheses, i.e. roughly hypotheses that are put together in an ad hoc or arbitrary way, have internal barriers that prevent the spread of confirmation between their parts. Thus even though the conjunction of the general theory of relativity with the claim that the moon is made of cheese gets confirmed by the perihelion of Mercury since the latter is entailed by the conjunction, the confirmation does not spread to the conjunct that the moon is made of cheese. In other words, it is not always the case that support spreads to all the parts of a hypotheses, and even when it does, it is not always the case that it spreads to the different parts in equal measure. See also[edit] Coherence theory of truth No true Scotsman Semantic holism Theory-ladenness Truth theory References[edit] ^ W. V. O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism.' The Philosophical Review, 60 (1951), pp. 20–43. online text ^ Duhem, Pierre. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1954. ^ Curd, M. and Cover, J.A. (Eds.) (1998). Philosophy of Science, Section 3, The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination, W.W. Norton & Company. ^ a b Grünbaum, A. 1962. "The falsifiability of theories: total or partial? A contemporary evaluation of the Duhem-Quine thesis", Synthese, vol. 14:17-34. doi:10.1007/BF02274802 ^ W. V. O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism.' The Philosophical Review, 60 (1951), pp. 20–43. online text ^ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/09/09/63-solo-finding-gravity-within-quantum-mechanics/ ^ http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/people/Ashtekar/articles/rovelli03.pdf ^ Gemes, K. 1993. 'Hypothetico-Deductivism, Content, and the Natural Axiomatization of Theories', Philosophy of Science, vol. 60:477-487. online text ^ Votsis, Ioannis (2014). "Objectivity in confirmation: Post hoc monsters and novel predictions" (PDF). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A. 45: 70–78. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2013.10.009. 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Adorno Gaston Bachelard Mario Bunge Wilhelm Dilthey Paul Feyerabend Hans-Georg Gadamer Thomas Kuhn György Lukács Karl Popper Willard Van Orman Quine Max Weber Concepts in contention Knowledge Objectivity Phronesis Truth Verstehen Category Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Confirmation_holism&oldid=961193710" Categories: Epistemology of science Metatheory of science Holism Willard Van Orman Quine Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from May 2015 Articles with unsourced statements from January 2014 Articles containing German-language text Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version Languages Español עברית Suomi Edit links This page was last edited on 7 June 2020, at 03:35 (UTC). 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