 Moreover, such differences in the character and strength of various claims of underdetermination turn out to be crucial for resolving the significance of the issue. For example, in some recently influential discussions of science it has become commonplace for scholars in a wide variety of academic disciplines to make casual appeal to claims of underdetermination (especially of the holist variety) to support the idea that something besides evidence must step in to do the further work of determining beliefs and/or changes of belief in scientific contexts: perhaps most prominent among these are adherents of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) movement and some feminist science critics who have argued that it is typically the sociopolitical interests and/or pursuit of power and influence by scientists themselves which play a crucial and even decisive role in determining which beliefs are actually abandoned or retained in response to conflicting evidence. As we will see in Section 2.2, however, Larry Laudan has argued that such claims depend upon simple equivocation between the comparatively weak or trivial forms of underdetermination that their partisans have managed to establish and the far stronger forms from which they draw radical conclusions about the limited reach of evidence and rationality in science. In the sections that follow we will seek to clearly characterize and distinguish the various forms of both holist and contrastive underdetermination that have been suggested to arise in scientific contexts (noting some important connections between them along the way), assess the strength and significance of the heterogeneous argumentative considerations offered in support of and against them, and consider just which forms of underdetermination pose genuinely consequential challenges for scientific inquiry.