Betting the House
10th July 2024
One of my favourite ideas in philosophy is the Duhem-Quine thesis, one of those concepts “discovered” independently by two different people using two different approaches, which tells us that we can never eliminate all but one explanation for a single event. There will always be other potential reasons for what happened. Consider Emma Raducanu. Until the current Wimbledon, she had exited every Grand Slam she had entered after her triumph in New York no later than the Second Round. Is she an elite, Grand Slam-winning level tennis player on a run of bad form, or is she a 30-60 ranked player who once got lucky? Her results support both interpretations and give us no reason to pick one over the other. (I see that she is now out of Wimbledon, losing to a mere qualifier).
The upshot of this is that it is never wise to commit too heavily to any particular interpretation because there is a reasonable chance that it will be wrong.