Blaise Pascal

There is a philo­soph­i­cal the­sis (attrib­uted jointly to Pierre Duhem and Willard Quine) that, when sim­pli­fied, explains how a given set of facts can pro­duce more than one appar­ently true con­clu­sion: essen­tially, dif­fer­ent back­ground assump­tions lead to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions. A related con­cept is known as under­de­ter­mi­na­tion: that a given set of evi­dence can be explained by more than one – poten­tially con­flict­ing – theory.