 Contrastive underdetermination is so-called because it questions the ability of the evidence to confirm any given hypothesis against alternatives, and the central focus of discussion in this connection (equally often regarded as “the” problem of underdetermination) concerns the character of the supposed alternatives. Of course the two problems are not entirely disconnected, because it is open to us to consider alternative possible modifications of the web of beliefs as alternative theories or theoretical “systems” between which the empirical evidence alone is powerless to decide. But we have already seen that one need not think of the alternative responses to recalcitrant experience as competing theoretical alternatives to appreciate the character of the holist’s challenge, and we will see that one need not embrace any version of holism about confirmation to appreciate the quite distinct problem that the available evidence might support more than one theoretical alternative. It is perhaps most useful here to think of holist underdetermination as starting from a particular theory or body of beliefs and claiming that our revision of those beliefs in response to new evidence may be underdetermined, while contrastive underdetermination instead starts from a given body of evidence and claims that more than one theory may be well-supported by that very evidence. Part of what has contributed to the conflation of these two problems is the holist presuppositions of those who originally made them famous. After all, on Quine’s view we simply revise the web of belief in response to recalcitrant experience, and so the suggestion that there are multiple possible revisions of the web available in response to any particular evidential finding just is the claim that there are in fact many different “theories” (i.e. candidate webs of belief) that are equally well-supported by any given body of  data.[6]  But if we give up such extreme holist views of evidence, meaning, and/or confirmation, the two problems take on very different identities, with very different considerations in favor of taking them seriously, very different consequences, and very different candidate solutions. Notice, for instance, that even if we somehow knew that no other hypothesis on a given subject was well-confirmed by a given body of data, that would not tell us where to place the blame or which of our beliefs to give up if the remaining hypothesis in conjunction with others subsequently resulted in a failed empirical prediction. And as Duhem suggests above, even if we supposed that we somehow knew exactly which of our hypotheses to blame in response to a failed empirical prediction, this would not help us to decide whether or not there are other hypotheses available that are equally well-confirmed by the data we actually have.