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In the epistemology 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 only a set of statements (a whole theory). 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.〔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.〕 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.〔Curd, M. and Cover, J.A. (Eds.) (1998). Philosophy of Science, Section 3, The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination, W.W. Norton & Company.〕 A related claim made by Quine, though contested by some (see Adolf Grünbaum 1962),〔Grünbaum, A. 1962. 'The falsifiability of theories: total or partial? A contemporary evaluation of the Duhem-Quine thesis', Synthese, vol. 14:17-34. (online text )〕 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.".〔W. v. O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism.' ''The Philosophical Review'', 60 (1951), pp. 20–43. (online text )〕 ==Underdetermination in physical theory== 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. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「confirmation holism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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