"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most
casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of
atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made
fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to
change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary
conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery
occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have
to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of some
statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical
interconnections--the logical laws being in turn simply certain further
statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having
reevaluated one statement we must reevaluate some others, which
may be statements logically connected with the first or may be the
statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so
underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is
much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light
of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked
with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except
indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a
whole."
--WvO Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in From a Logical Point of View, 42-3
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