 It is perhaps unsurprising that such holist underdetermination has often been taken to pose a threat to the fundamental rationality of the scientific enterprise. The claim that the empirical evidence alone underdetermines our response to failed predictions or recalcitrant experience might even seem to fairly invite the suggestion that what systematically steps into the breach to do the further work of singling out just one or a few candidate responses to disconfirming evidence is (even if “pragmatic”) something irrational or at least arational in character. Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend each suggested that because of underdetermination, the difference between empirically successful and unsuccessful theories or research programs is largely a function of the differences in talent, creativity, resolve, and resources of those who advocate them. And at least since the influential work of Thomas Kuhn, one important line of thinking about science has held that it is ultimately the social and political interests (in a suitably broad sense) of scientists themselves which serve to determine their responses to disconfirming evidence and therefore the further empirical, methodological, and other commitments of any given scientist or scientific community. Mary Hesse suggests that Quinean underdetermination showed why certain “non-logical” and “extra-empirical” considerations must play a role in theory choice, and claims that “it is only a short step from this philosophy of science to the suggestion that adoption of such criteria, that can be seen to be different for different groups and at different periods, should be explicable by social rather than logical factors” (1980, 33). And perhaps the most prominent modern day inheritors of this line of thinking are those scholars in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) movement and in feminist science studies who argue that it is typically the career interests, political affiliations, intellectual allegiances, gender biases, and/or pursuit of power and influence by scientists themselves which play a crucial or even decisive role in determining precisely which beliefs are abandoned or retained in response to conflicting evidence. The shared argumentative schema here is one on which holist underdetermination ensures that the evidence alone cannot do the work of picking out a single response to such conflicting evidence, thus something else must step in to do the job, and sociologists of scientific knowledge, feminist critics of science, and other interest-driven theorists of science each have their favored suggestions close to hand. 