EMPIRICAL EQUIVALENCE, UNDERDETERMINATION, AND SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD

The underdetermination of theory by evidence must be distinguished fro m holism. The latter is a doctrine about the testing of scientific hyp otheses; the former is a thesis about empirically adequate logically i ncompatible global theories or ''systems of the world''. The distincti on is crucial for an adequate assessment of the underdetermination the sis. The paper shows how some treatments of underdetermination are vit iated by failure to observe this distinction, and identifies some nece ssary conditions for the existence of multiple empirically equivalent global theories. We consider how empiricists should respond to the pos sibility of such systems of the world.