Duhem–Quine thesis
Principle in the philosophy of science / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In philosophy of science, the Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, posits that it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses): the thesis says that unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible.[1] It is named after French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem and American logician Willard Van Orman Quine, who wrote about similar concepts.
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In recent decades, the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses. Although a bundle of hypotheses (i.e. a hypothesis and its background assumptions) as a whole can be tested against the empirical world and be falsified if it fails the test, the Duhem–Quine thesis says it is impossible to isolate a single hypothesis in the bundle, a viewpoint called confirmation holism.