Two Dogmas of Empiricism

• https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/デュエム-クワイン%E3%83%BBテーゼ

  • Quine significantly expanded on Duhem’s thesis. In his paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” he argues for a holistic view of belief verification. According to this view, our system of beliefs forms a cohesive web, and is never confronted individually with external stimuli (observations), but always faces observations as a whole web. Even if predictions derived from the web of beliefs contradict observations, the contradiction can be resolved by modifying some part of the web, and no specific belief is ever refuted. Conversely, there are no beliefs that are inherently immune to revision based on experience, and even logical axioms can be revised in certain cases. As a result of this holistic view, when there are two conflicting theories, no experience can negate either one, and any belief can be maintained in the face of any experience. This is Quine’s thesis.

  • This seems to connect to Kuhn and Popper.