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Holist underdeterminism is said to occur when we are unable to test a specific hypothesis in isolation. For example, when testing Einstein’s general relativity, astronomers attempted to observe light bending during a solar eclipse – they did in fact observe this light bending, and used this as evidence to confirm Einstein’s theory and to reject Newton’s. But, strictly speaking, the evidence given by this experiment underdetermines our response to it, because it could be that this test refutes theories of optics rather than Newton’s theory of gravity, or that it refutes our estimates of the mass of the sun, or any other connected, tacitly assumed theory. The key point behind holist underdeterminism is that there can be no such thing as a “crucial experiment” – an experiment that decisively confirms one theory and refutes another. This idea was developed by Duhem in his Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, and was further developed by Quine in subsequent years.[[CiteRef::Stanford (2016)]]

Contrastive underdeterminism is more relevant to our discussion on the thesis of scientific underdeterminism. It states that “for any body of evidence confirming a theory, there might well be other theories that are also well confirmed by that same body of evidence”[[CiteRef::Stanford (2016)]] – where the meaning of “confirmed” is of course dependent on the given scientific community. It may be better to state this as “for any body of evidence causing a theory to satisfy a communities acceptance criteria, there might well be other theories…” The reason this form of underdeterminism is more relevant to the issue at hand is because it clearly states that there are many possible theories that could satisfy a given body of evidence – and that as a result, there may be no way of predicting which of them is accepted. A similar thesis can be formulated for methods in the obvious way – given a community’s implicit expectations, there are many methods that can implement these, so there is no way to predict which of them will become implemented.

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