Editing Willard Van Orman Quine (section)

====Confirmation holism and ontological relativity====
Colleague [[Hilary Putnam]] called Quine's [[indeterminacy of translation]] thesis "the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]]'s ''[[Critique of Pure Reason|Transcendental Deduction of the Categories]]''".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Putnam |first=Hilary |title=The refutation of conventionalism |journal=Noûs  |volume=8 |number=1 |date=March 1974 |pages= 25–40 |jstor=2214643 |doi=10.2307/2214643}}  Reprinted in {{cite book |last=Putnam |first=Hilary |date=1979 |isbn=0521295513 |title=Philosophical Papers; Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality |publisher=Cambridge University Press |chapter=Chapter 9: The refutation of conventionalism |pages=153–191 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_0W5ByvEPEgC&pg=PA159}} Quote on p. 159.
</ref> The central theses underlying it are [[ontological relativity]] and the related [[doctrine]] of [[confirmation holism]]. The premise of confirmation [[holism]] is that all theories (and the propositions derived from them) are [[underdetermination|under-determined]] by empirical data (data, [[Sense data|sensory-data]], evidence); although some theories are not justifiable, failing to fit with the data or being unworkably complex, there are many equally justifiable alternatives. While the [[Ancient Greece|Greeks]]' assumption that (unobservable) [[Homer]]ic gods exist is false and our supposition of (unobservable) [[electromagnetic radiation|electromagnetic waves]] is true, both are to be justified solely by their ability to explain our observations.

The ''[[gavagai]]'' [[thought experiment]] tells about a linguist, who tries to find out, what the expression ''gavagai'' means, when uttered by a speaker of a yet unknown, native language upon seeing a rabbit. At first glance, it seems that ''gavagai'' simply translates with ''rabbit''. Now, Quine points out that the background language and its referring devices might fool the linguist here, because he is misled in a sense that he always makes direct comparisons between the foreign language and his own. However, when shouting ''gavagai'', and pointing at a rabbit, the natives could as well refer to something like ''undetached rabbit-parts'', or ''rabbit-[[Trope (philosophy)|tropes]]'' and it would not make any observable difference. The behavioural data the linguist could collect from the native speaker would be the same in every case, or to reword it, several translation hypotheses could be built on the same sensoric stimuli.

Quine concluded his "[[Two Dogmas of Empiricism]]" as follows:
<blockquote>
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer …. For my part I do, ''qua'' lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
</blockquote>

Quine's ontological [[relativism]] (evident in the passage above) led him to agree with [[Pierre Duhem]] that for any collection of [[empirical evidence]], there would always be many theories able to account for it, known as the [[Duhem–Quine thesis]]. However, Duhem's [[holism]] is much more restricted and limited than Quine's. For Duhem, [[underdetermination]] applies only to [[physics]] or possibly to [[natural science]], while for Quine it applies to all of human knowledge. Thus, while it is possible to verify or [[falsifiability|falsify]] whole theories, it is not possible to verify or falsify individual statements. Almost any particular statement can be saved, given sufficiently radical modifications of the containing theory. For Quine, scientific thought forms a [[Coherentism|coherent]] web in which any part could be altered in the light of empirical evidence, and in which no empirical evidence could force the revision of a given part.