Confirmation and Meaning Holism Revisited
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Confirmation and Meaning Holism Revisited Timothy Fuller1 Received: 28 December 2017 / Accepted: 19 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract Does confirmation holism imply meaning holism? A plausible and novel argument, all of whose premises enjoy significant support among contemporary philosophers, links the two theses. This article presents this argument and diagnoses it with a weakness. The weakness illustrates a general difficulty with drawing morals for the nature of ordinary thought and language from claims about the nature of science. The diagnosis is instructive: It suggests more fruitful relations between theories of scientific theory confirmation and semantic theories of our everyday thoughts and statements.
1 Introduction and Background Two kinds of holism have been especially prominent in analytic philosophy over the past century: holism about scientific theory confirmation and holism about meaning. This article addresses whether the former has implications for the latter by examining a novel argument—all of whose premises enjoy widespread support—that links the two theses. The argument is of particular interest because it illustrates the complexities of drawing morals for theories of ordinary thought and language from theories of the nature of science. Although I diagnose the argument with a weakness, the diagnosis suggests more fruitful relations between both types of theories. Confirmation holism has been aptly characterized as a “galaxy of nonequivalent (but closely interrelated) doctrines” (Fodor and Lepore 1992, p. 39). Among this cluster, I will understand scientific confirmation holism (SCH) as: SCH: Entire scientific theories, or at least large portions of them, are confirmed by evidence or observations rather than isolated hypotheses, laws or auxiliary statements.
* Timothy Fuller [email protected] 1
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Two related claims principally support SCH. According to the first, an individual hypothesis, law or auxiliary statement does not have proprietary empirical consequences when considered in isolation, but rather implies empirical claims only when conjoined with (large portions of) entire theories. Hempel prominently argued for this first claim: A single sentence in a scientific theory does not, as a rule, entail observation sentences; consequences asserting the occurrence of certain observable phenomena can be derived from it only by conjoining it with a set of other, subsidiary hypotheses… Thus, e.g., the relativistic theory of the deflection of light rays in the gravitational field of the sun entails assertions about observable phenomena only if it is conjoined with a considerable body of astronomical and optical theory as well as a large number of specific statements about the instruments used in those observations of solar eclipses which serve to test the hypothesis in question (1965, p. 112). A second and related supporting claim for SCH
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