 In fact, there is an important connection between this lacuna in Laudan’s famous discussion and the further uses made of the thesis of underdetermination by sociologists of scientific knowledge, feminist epistemologists, and other vocal champions of holist underdetermination. When faced with the invocation of further ampliative standards or principles that supposedly rule out some responses to disconfirmation as irrational or unreasonable, these thinkers typically respond by insisting that the embrace of such further standards or principles (or perhaps their application to particular cases) is itself underdetermined, historically contingent, and/or subject to ongoing social negotiation. For this reason, they suggest, such appeals (and their success or failure in convincing the members of a given community) should be explained by reference to the same broadly social and political interests that they claim are at the root of theory choice and belief change in science more generally (see, e.g., Shapin and Schaffer, 1982). On both accounts, then, our response to recalcitrant evidence or a failed prediction is constrained in important ways by preexisting features of the existing web of beliefs, but for Quine the continuing force of these constraints is ultimately imposed by the fundamental principles of human psychology (such as our preference for minimal mutilation of the web, or the pragmatic virtues of simplicity, fecundity, etc.), while for interest-driven theorists of science the continuing force of any such constraints is limited only by the ongoing negotiated agreement of the communities of scientists who respect them.