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Longino criticizes the '''holistic''' view of Kuhn and Quine. Quine treats knowledge as a web of belief. Some of these beliefs are closer to the core which implies that they are harder to reject compared to other beliefs in the periphery. The belief in causality is much harder to falsify than belief in aether theory. According to Kuhn’s account, an exemplary instance of scientific research can be considered a paradigm. Longino rejects both of these accounts on the grounds that background assumptions can always be evaluated. She tries to resolve the problems posed by Kuhn’s and Strong Programme’s account for the objectivity of science. She believes that a scientific community, which achieved transformative criticism, can evaluate background assumptions with free discourse on it. Another important aspect of Longino’s view is that change in background assumptions can affect the epistemic context of justification and the evidential status of various observations. Thus, Longino can explain the problem of the existence of different standards of evaluation over time without any reference to incommensurability. Kuhn’s notion of radical incommensurability does not allow scientists to say there are differences between paradigms due to the fact that there are no common referents. If scientists who subscribe to different paradigms are just talking past one another, how can they be certain that they are referring to different objects? Background assumption do allow for this contrast since they can have common referents.

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