Confirmation Holism

Confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is attributed to Willard van Orman Quine's extension of Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination as to physical theory, Quine's extension of underdetermination to all knowledge claims, since no theory of any type can be tested in isolation, but only embedded on a background of innumerable and often undetermined factors. (See Quine-Duhem thesis.) Confirmation holism thus involves the problem of credit assignment, determining which aspect of the overall network to attribute a theory's failure to. And by ontological relativity, explicated by Quine, one can always protect one's explanation of phenomena by attributing failure to some aspect outside the explanation.