You can never test a single scientific claim completely on its own

Any real experiment doesn't just test the hypothesis you're interested in — it also silently relies on your instruments working correctly and your background assumptions holding up. So when a prediction fails, logic alone can't tell you whether your hypothesis is wrong or one of those unstated assumptions is. Pierre Duhem noticed this for physics in 1906; W.V.O. Quine extended it to knowledge in general in 1951.

— Willard Van Orman Quine (building on Pierre Duhem), Two Dogmas of Empiricism — The Philosophical Review, 1951

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