Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tisthammerw (talk | contribs) at 18:27, 11 November 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Duhem-Quine thesis (also called the Duhem-Quine problem) is chiefly about being unable to test a theory in isolation, and that in practice testing a theory requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). Theories by themselves are often incapable of making predictions. Instead, the empirical consequences of a theory typically rest on background assumptions from which to derive predictions. This prevents a theory from becoming conclusively falsified through empirical means if the background assumptions are not proven (since background assumptions sometimes involve one or more scientific theories, and if scientific theories are not strictly proven, then this is often the case). For instance, to “disprove” the idea that the earth was moving, some people noted that birds did not get thrown off into the sky whenever they let go of a tree branch. That data is no longer accepted as empirical evidence that the earth is not moving because we have adopted a different background system of physics that allows us to make different predictions.

Although a bundle of theories (i.e. a theory and its background assumptions) as a whole can be tested against the empirical world and be falsified if the test fails, the Duhem-Quine thesis makes it more difficult to isolate a single, individual theory in the bundle. One solution is that when we have rational reason to accept the background assumptions as true (e.g. scientific theories via evidence) we will have rational--albeit nonconclusive--reason for thinking that the theory tested is probably wrong the empirical test fails.