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Yes
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This is an idea by Pierre Duhem, later taken up and expanded by Quine. It seems to be a popular modern theory, from what I'm told.
The thesis boils down to saying that everything is revisable in science. No experiment can ever disprove a single hypothesis -- it can only alter an entire group. Any theory involves a system of auxiliary hypothesis, and when an experiment contradicts the theory any of the auxiliary hypothesis can be altered to make the data fit. This can be expanded, as Quine expanded it, to apply to all knowledge. Knowledge consists simply of a set of assumptions that have worked consistently so far. All we can do is try to have a consistent model, rather than having absolute knowledge involved. All our methods of determining knowledge are useful only in that they help us find ways to be consistent. The scientific method, for example, was described as a "psudorational idea" by Otto Neurath. (It seems to help us be consistent, but isn't inherently correct.) If you do an experiment and find that something you throw at the ground goes up, you have the theoretical option of revising any of the nearly infinite number of auxiliary assumptions involved. You could choose to revise the theory of gravity to allow for that object to be repelled by gravitation. However, no one can operate in a system that gets totally junked and revised every five minutes... because of that, you try to make the smallest possible change to the system of auxiliary assumptions that will allow the results of your experiments to be explained. In this case, for example, you might suppose that there's a giant magnet over your head attracting the object. (In other words, you revise the auxiliary assumption of no giant magnets being around.) This would be a simpler way to revise your system of assumptions (which had previously included the assumption that there weren't any magnets over your head) than revising gravity. You cause only a tiny ripple, instead of turning the world upside down. Yet, it's important to note that there's still nothing objectively wrong about choosing to modify the theory of gravity to say that when giant magnets are over your head gravity works in reverse with regard to certain types of [magnetic] balls you throw -- it's just really confusing because you're revising the definition of gravity to incorporate electromagnetism. Neurath's metaphor may help. Knowledge is viewed as being a ship out in the middle of the ocean. Now let's say you have a bunch of newer timber that you can use to replace the timber the ship is currently made out of. You have the option of removing any plank from the ship to replace it with a newer plank. There's no piece anywhere that's essential to the ship. However, if you were to try to pull out all the old planks at once, the ship would sink and you'd drown. So, even if you may eventually replace every single board on the ship with a new one, you have to do it in small increments. This parallels how you can revise any auxiliary assumption (from gravity to the existence of the Earth) to make new data fit in more consistently, but you usually try to make only a small change so that you don't lose your whole system of beliefs at once and drown. All knowledge is revisable, nothing is an absolute, but you still try to stay around the edges with change so that you don't lose your entire system and end up back in the stone age. Quine put forth the idea that the Duhem thesis can be expanded to cover even things that are supposedly analytic (he says there's no distinction between analytic and synthetic statements). Math, for example, becomes only a set of theories with auxiliary assumptions that can be revised in any way when some new idea comes along. Reductionism (the idea that one thing can be described fully in terms of anohter) is also rejected by Quine. Here's Quine's essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which is mostly about this subject: http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html Knowledge is seen as working assumptions rather than absolutes. Truth becomes flexible and is reduced to consistency. Specforces
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