Defense on Quine’s Holism against Fundamentalism Suspicions

Abstract

Holism is an important proposition of Quine’s philosophy, a theory that reveals that human knowledge is structured as a web-like whole, with its edges coming into contact with experience and thus expanding the scope of knowledge, and that the body of knowledge can be modified from the outside in when mistakes are made. This structure reflects the relativity of human knowledge and rejects fundamentalism. However, Quine’s concept of background theory describes a reliable relationship between a theory and another theory, which the former is explanatorily based on the later. Moreover, his concept of observation sentence is stated as the base of semantic. These terms seem to make his philosophy rely on some degree of fundamentalism again, which means that Quine’s holism is self contradictory. This paper will start from the fundamentalist suspicions in Quine’s holistic philosophy, then explain the tension between his holism and fundamentalism, and thus defend Quine’s holism.