Quine's historic objection to this account is that this is not the way how theories confront the world. As against the verificationist stand, Quine puts forward his well-known thesis that sentences do not meet experience one by one but as "corporate body". The theory as a whole is what matters when it interacts with experience. This is where Quine sharply differs from verificationist understanding of the composition of a theory. In verificationist account, a theory is an additive concept because a theory is understood as consisting of individual sentences. They are like parts and a theory is a summation of these parts. The Duhem-Quine thesis rejects this view of verificationists. They viewed that a theory as a whole cannot be identified with the mere summation of its parts, namely, the individual sentences. A theory is far more than such a summation. In this regard, the positivists' idea of sentences having meaning individually is no longer tenable. The failure of verificationism arises due to its wrong notion of theory and its relationship with the world.
Duhem points out that the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses. When the experiment is an disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not disagree which one should be changed.4
Duhem's thesis is specific to hypothesis of physics. He states that experiments are to be confirmed or unconfirmed take place within a group of hypotheses. Deviating from Duhem, but not completely, Quine expresses that what confirms or conflicts within a group of hypotheses are not due to the results of experiments but due to the persuasion of sense-experiences. Here Quine goes ahead of Duhem by viewing that Duhem's model of meaning holism delimits its scope within the sphere of physics. Hence, he expresses that even a statement very close to the periphery (of our field of beliefs) can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination (TDE/Duhem, 1962,43).
| 4 | This concept is borrowed from Duhem, P. (1962). The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Translated by P.L.D. Broglie, New York: Athenaeum Publication, p.187. |