Underdetermination

The term underdetermination refers to a broad family of arguments about the relations between theory and
evidence. All share the conclusion that evidence is more or less impotent to guide choice between rival theories or
hypotheses. In one or other of its guises, underdetermination has probably been the most potent and most
pervasive idea driving twentieth-century forms of scepticism and epistemological relativism. It figures prominently
in the writing of diverse influential philosophers. It is a complex family of doctrines, each with a different
argumentative structure. Most, however, suppose that only the logical consequences of a hypothesis are relevant
to its empirical support. This supposition can be challenged.
1 Relevant terminology
The thesis of underdetermination involves a set of specific claims about the relations between bodies of evidence
or statements about that evidence, on the one hand, and theories, on the other. All forms of that thesis insist that
multiple, mutually incompatible, theories can enjoy the same relation to any given body of evidence. Beyond that
point of agreement, however, there are more and less ambitious versions of underdetermination. A few
terminological preliminaries are in order before we proceed to examine some of them. To facilitate comparison of
the various versions of underdetermination, I shall use this vocabulary: e will refer to whatever evidence is in
hand; c will refer to relevant rules or criteria for choosing between hypotheses; and I shall further suppose that we
are confronted by a single hypothesis h or, more commonly, by a set of rival hypotheses, h
1
; h
2
; : : : ;
n
(some of
which may not have been explicitly formulated).
Now, what every version of the thesis of underdetermination shares in common is this claim: that the relevant
criteria, c, and available evidence, e, will provide no rational grounds for preferring h
i
to some (and perhaps not to
any) of the rivals to h
i
. Various versions of the thesis of underdetermination explore its plausibility under various
interpretations of c, the criteria of appraisal.
2 Deductive and ampliative underdetermination
Hume argued convincingly that one cannot derive a genuinely universal statement from any finite set of its
positive instances (see Hume, D. 2). This is surely correct, but what does it entail for the theory of knowledge?
One thing it certainly shows is that if the only criteria of theory choice we allow are those of deductive logic, then
the rational acceptance of a theory is always underdetermined by any conceivable evidence. Karl Popper explicitly
drew this moral fromHumes work (see Popper, K.R. 2). It explains why Popper resisted the idea that positive
belief in a theory could ever be rational. (Belief for Popper, as for Hume, was a matter of animal instinct.)
Most philosophers refuse to follow Popper in supposing that the rules of deductive logic exhaust the epistemic and
methodological resources available for the appraisal of hypotheses. They believe that there are various principles
of ampliative inference that come into play in the evaluation of hypotheses. The fact that deductive logic
underdetermines theory choice leaves open, they insist, the possibility that these other nondeductive principles
may guide theory choice unambiguously.
One plausible, if simplistic, ampliative rule of theory evaluation is what Carl Hempel called the Nicod criterion
(1965). According to this idea, if some h entails a particular observation report, then the truth of that observation
report counts as evidence for h; if the observation report is false, then it counts as evidence against h. About a
century ago, Henri Poincar and others stressed the significance of the fact that, through any finite number of
points, indefinitely many curves could be drawn. This made clear that indefinitely many alternative hypotheses
were compatible with (indeed, deductively entailed by) any given body of data. If one supposes, with the Nicod
criterion, that the potential evidence for h consists simply in its observational consequences, then it is clear that
indefinitely many different and conflicting hypotheses will share the same evidential instances. If we take the
Nicod rule as a criterion for hypothesis evaluation, it follows that, whenever we are confronted with an h enjoying
apparent evidential support (that is, having many true positive or entailed instances), we know that there will be
indefinitely many incompatible hypotheses possessing those same instances as evidence - even if we cannot
formulate them. In sum, theory choice is underdetermined by any methodology which countenances all and only
the known positive (or otherwise entailed) instances of a hypothesis as confirmatory.
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Nelson Goodmans new riddles of induction provided concrete illustrations of the point (1965). Consider a
hypothesis like all emeralds are green and a contrived rival like all emeralds are green before the year 2000 AD
and blue thereafter. If our observations consist entirely of green-appearing emeralds examined before 2000, then
both hypotheses can claim all the same positive instances. Prior to the year 2000, the evidence, however extensive,
appears impotent to guide choice between them (see Goodman, N. 3; Induction, epistemic issues in).
It is important to note that, even if hypothesis choice is underdetermined in this specific sense, that does not entail
that every rival to a given h will fare as well as h does. It means, rather, that there will be rivals which will fare as
well.
3 Holistic underdetermination (the D-thesis)
Arguments of a very different sort undergird an even more global form of underdetermination. During the 1950s,
W.V. Quine revived arguments made earlier in the century by Pierre Duhem (1906) about the inconclusiveness of
falsification (see Duhem, P.M.M.; Quine, W.V. 3). Specifically, the Duhem thesis (D-thesis) holds that
hypotheses never approach the tribunal of experience singly but only as parts of much larger webs of belief. This
must be so, since auxiliary hypotheses are typically needed even to determine what a given hypothesis predicts
about experience. Suppose, asks Quine, that the result predicted by a web of such hypotheses turns out to be
mistaken? In that case, he maintains, all we have learned is that we have made a mistake somewhere in our body of
beliefs but that blame cannot be further localized. Moreover, he insists that we can hang on to any particular
hypothesis we like come what may, since we can always blame any empirical failures of the web on other
strands. More precisely, Quine holds that any given h can be maintained in the face of any apparently negative
evidence because (he thinks) there will always be some auxiliary that can be legitimately invoked which will bring
h into line with whatever we observe. Any h can, with suitable changes elsewhere in our beliefs, be made to
explain any evidence. Although Quine and others have repeatedly asserted this thesis to be true, it has never been
proven that every apparently refuted hypothesis can be saved in the face of any evidence by invoking a nontrivial
auxiliary hypothesis.
If, however, this is correct, then we have a much more global sort of underdetermination to contend with. Whereas
previous versions of the underdetermination thesis argued that, for any apparently successful h, there will be at
least one rival which exhibits the same success, the holistic version of the underdeterminationist thesis seems to
say that, given any apparently successful h, all of its rivals can be made to fit the same evidence that supports h,
whatever e is. This view appears to entail a thesis of cognitive egalitarianism, namely, that all rival hypotheses can
- with sufficient ingenuity - be made to appear equally well supported by whatever evidence is in hand.
4 Undermining underdetermination
What Quines version of the underdetermination thesis takes for granted, as do virtually all others, is the idea that a
hypothesis entailed instances are coextensive with its epistemically supporting instances. He is committed to this
since he countenances two hypotheses as equally well supported by e provided that both hypotheses entail e. This
idea, the Nicod criterion, undergirds the paradoxes of confirmation, the Goodman paradoxes of induction and
Quinean underdetermination.
Those who are less taken with the underdetermination thesis believe that its identification of entailed consequences
with evidentially supporting instances rests on a misunderstanding of how empirical support works. Specifically, it
is easy to show both (a) that many entailed instances of an hypothesis lend it no empirical support and (b) that
much of the support enjoyed by many hypotheses comes from outside the set of its entailed consequences. As an
example of (a), consider the fact that data used to fix the parameters of a hypothesis, by virtue of being built into h
itself, cannot then be used as reasons for accepting h, even though (trivially) h entails them. As regards (b), it is
virtually a truism that hypotheses can derive evidential support from instances not entailed by those hypotheses.
For instance, the information that the last 10,000 crows have been black is evidence for the hypothesis that the next
crow I observe will be black, even though that latter hypothesis entails nothing about the 10,000 crows. Equally,
probabilistic statements (for example, most humans die before the age of 100) typically do not entail any specific
claim about observed relative frequencies, even though those same relative frequencies can both confirm and
disconfirm statistical hypotheses. Even with respect to a nonprobabilistic hypothesis, one can often derive
empirical support from evidence which h does not entail but which is entailed by yet more general hypotheses that
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in turn entail h. Thus, after the Newtonian synthesis, evidence about bodies falling on the face of the earth supports
Keplers laws, even though Keplers laws themselves entail nothing whatever about cases of terrestrial free fall.
In sum, the supporting instances for a hypothesis are not coextensive with its entailed instances nor are its
undermining instances exclusively those denied by h. Where does this leave the thesis of underdetermination?
Because all the advocates of underdetermination have operated with this mistaken notion of empirical support -
which assimilates support to being a logical consequence of a hypothesis - we do not presently know whether
choice of theory is underdetermined by the evidence. While we do know that rival theories may well have the
same known empirical consequences, this knowledge seems to be irrelevant to questions of empirical support,
since there are ample grounds for denying that empirical consequences and supporting instances amount to the
same thing.
It should be noted, finally, that virtually all formulations of the thesis of underdetermination presuppose that, in
judging whether the available evidence supports a given hypothesis, we must assure ourselves that there is no
possible hypothesis which could be equally well supported. The idea that extant hypotheses are being compared (at
least implicitly) with all possible rival hypotheses is probably a hyperbolic view of the theory choice situation.
Scientists repeatedly point out that the problem generally facing them is finding even one hypothesis that will fit
with the available evidence. The philosophers penchant for supposing that the function of evidence is to enable
one to choose, not merely between extant hypotheses, but between all possible hypotheses is a conceit that could
profitably be dispensed with.
See also: Confirmation Theory; Crucial experiments; Inductive Inference; Scientific method
LARRY LAUDAN
References and further reading
Duhem, P. (1906) La thorie physique. Son objet et sa structure, Paris: Chevalier et Rivire; trans. P.P. Wiener,
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954.(One of the earliest
attempts to explore the implications of underdetermination for the epistemology of science.)
Glymour, C. (1980) Theory and Evidence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A detailed account of the
evidence relation in science.)
Goodman, N. (1965) Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.(A nominalists formulation of
new challenges to the idea of instance confirmation, discussed in 2.)
Grnbaum, A. (1974) Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, Dordrecht: Reidel. (The standard critique of
Duhem and Quines accounts of underdetermination.)
Hempel, C.G. (1965) Aspects of Explanation, New York: Free Press.(The principal formulation and critique of the
qualitative theory of confirmation.)
Laudan, L. and Leplin, J. (1991) Empirical Equivalence and Underdetermination, Journal of Philosophy 88:
449-72.(Elaboration of many of the themes discussed here.)
Quine, W.V. (1953) From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(The locus
classicus for the Duhem-Quine thesis, discussed in 3.)
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