or, measuring the temperature of our concepts ...
INDIVIDUAL
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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GROUP
... "Quine bases his “confirmation holism” upon observations of
Pierre Duhem (1914 [1954]), who drew attention to the myriad ways in
which theories are supported by evidence, and the fact that an
hypothesis is not (dis)confirmed merely by some specific experiment
considered in isolation from an immense amount of surrounding theory.
...
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... Thus, a thermometer will be a good indication of ambient temperature
only if it’s made of the right materials, calibrated
appropriately, and there aren’t any other forces at work that
might disturb the measurement—and, of course, only if the
background laws of physics and other beliefs that have informed the
design of the measurement are sufficiently correct. A failure of the
thermometer to measure the temperature could be due to a failure of
any of these other conditions, which is, of course, why experimenters
spend so much time and money constructing experiments to
“control” for them. Moreover, with a small change in our
theories or background beliefs, or just in our understanding of the
conditions for measurement, we might change the tests on which we
rely, but often without changing the meaning of the sentences whose
truth we might be trying to establish (which, as Putnam 1965 [1975]
pointed out, is precisely what practicing scientists regularly
do)." ...
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3.4 Verification and Confirmation Holism, In -
Rey, Georges, "The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
forthcoming URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/analytic-synthetic/>.
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
