(January 3, 2023 at 8:04 am)Angrboda Wrote:(January 3, 2023 at 6:47 am)Jehanne Wrote: Well, then, let's say that after all of this a god, super being, etc., showed-up glowing with white rage and began torturing any doubting physicalists from the inside out until they, willingly or not, changed their minds and publicly recanted physicalism?
Quote:The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that in science 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. 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.
Wikipedia || Duhem-Quine thesis
Yeah, sure, we may all be brains in vats. However, if a super being showed-up and began torturing you until you either denied the Duhem–Quine thesis, executing you if you did not, the Duhem–Quine thesis would cease to be discussed in academic circles.