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Confirmation and Meaning Holism Revisited

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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.

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Notes

  1. Duhem was among the first to argue for such a claim, at least in the physical sciences (1906, p. 187).

  2. The proviso ‘at least partially’ is intended to accommodate inferential/conceptual role semanticists who adopt dual aspect approaches to the content of thoughts or language (e.g., Block 1986; Loar 1982).

  3. Quine endorsed such a view, for example, when he (notoriously) claimed that ‘the unit of measure of empirical significance is the whole of science’ (1951, p. 52). And Hempel similarly maintained that ‘[i]f… cognitive significance can be attributed to anything, then only to entire theoretical systems…’ (1951, p.113). ‘Empirical significance’ and ‘cognitive significance’ for Quine and Hempel are not quite the same as contemporary notions of meaning or content, but the differences are unimportant for present purposes.

  4. A commitment to a fundamental similarity between scientific and non-scientific language can be located in both Quine and Hempel’s work, though neither emphasizes nor significantly substantiates their commitment (cf. Quine 1986, p.619; Hempel 1965, p.112).

  5. See Peacocke (2002) for a criticism of this strategy for rejecting meaning holism (p.378).

  6. Asserting that confirmation holism is multiply ambiguous in some sense or other is not new (cf. Fodor and Lepore’s 1992 ‘galaxy of non-equivalent doctrines’ characterization mentioned earlier). The novel point pursued here is that scientific confirmation holism is an ambiguous thesis because there are different kinds of theories of scientific inference (see also Fuller and Samuels (2014) on this ambiguity and its implications for theories of cognitive architecture).

  7. These idealizations, pace Jonathan Cohen (1981), do not entail that a competence theory of scientific reasoning is the same as a normative theory of scientific reasoning. Insofar as individual scientists might fail to live up to normative standards, even under optimal circumstances, the two kinds of theories are entirely separable. For general arguments in favor of distinguishing competence from normative theories of reasoning see Stich (1990).

  8. As Fitelson (2008) points out, a requirement of total evidence is often an implicit rather than explicit commitment for Bayesians, unlike for Carnap.

  9. See, e.g., Kitcher (1992), Harman (1986), Samuels et al. (2004).

  10. See, e.g., Harman (1986), Gigerenzer (2001).

  11. One might be tempted to respond to this worry by denying that population-level-to-individual-level inferences are necessary in order to support Population-Level CH satisfying Suitability. According to this response, the confirmation of ordinary beliefs and statements is also typically a social-level or population-level phenomenon. The most plausible version of such a response would appeal to a version of The Extended Mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998) on which ordinary people’s minds commonly ‘extend’ out into their extra-cranial, social environments because their inferential capacities are routinely and heavily (inter)dependent on interactions with social communities. I have challenged extended accounts of both ordinary and scientific inferential activities in Fuller (2016), so I leave aside consideration of this response here.

  12. This example and its potential anti-holistic implications are extensively discussed in Maddy (2007) and Colyvan (2001).

  13. More examples of drawing “remote” connections across scientific domains can be found in Fodor (1983), Antony (2003) and Murphy (2006).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Richard Samuels, Joe Ullian and Kelly Trogdon for their comments on this article. Thanks also to audiences at the Central APA, Virginia Tech University and Underwood International College for valuable feedback during the formulation of this article’s content. Finally, thanks to Paul Pietroski for the suggestion to write this article in the first place.

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    Timothy Fuller

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Fuller, T. Confirmation and Meaning Holism Revisited. Erkenn 85, 1379–1397 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0082-9

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