Duhem–Quine thesis

In philosophy of science, the Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, posits that it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses): the thesis says that unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible. It is named after French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem and American logician Willard Van Orman Quine, who wrote about similar concepts.

In recent decades the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses. Although a bundle of hypotheses (i.e. a hypothesis and its background assumptions) as a whole can be tested against the empirical world and be falsified if it fails the test, the Duhem–Quine thesis says it is impossible to isolate a single hypothesis in the bundle, a viewpoint called confirmation holism.