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en-wikipedia-org-382		Confirmation holism - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	1855	288	46	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] 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. 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. 'Hypothetico-Deductivism, Content, and the Natural Axiomatization of Theories', Philosophy of Science, vol.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-382.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-382.txt