cliffs:
Fuck Kant.
And he is doing a very bad job at that.
Emotions come into play usually. It will take sometime to come out of a shell.. it also depends on the reputation of the scientist.. and finally it falls into the realms of politics. This goes on until someone achieves a breakthrough.
You're getting somewhere; But you are still trapped in the false hypothesis-testing word game.
Try thinking of the falsification-positivism you grew up with another way:
Positivism:
The theory is that a proposition is a scientific one if it is something that can be falsified. Now we don't have to have the means of testing if the idea is false, it just has to be logically possible to falsify the proposition. If we needed to have a means to falsify the proposition then we would have to say that empirical laws of physics are, themselves, not scientific.
When we test something we assume every other idea that supports those things you are testing. We have to assume as true the nomiological network that supports our independent, dependent and measurement. If we assume that we reject falsified ideas this all works out just fine; though with this assumption we must also be willing to reject everything we think we know that was built on the assumption of anything that is at some point falsified.
Let's pretend that our replication doesn't come out the way we expected... We've falsified! Except... what have we falsified? Was it the our hypothesis, or was it the quality of our instruments; barring contamination and bad tools.... what underlying assumed theory did we falsify? Look at the basic physics of reality; either quantum uncertainty is false or reality doesn't exist outside of the observer.
Let's consider our present argument... There are a plethora of underlying, hopefully falsifiable, assumptions that must be made to support a top-level theory like evolution. No matter how true evolution is: there will always be another gap into which a falsifiable but un-testable hypothesis may be interjected. You see, there is always another falsifiable but un-testable hypothesis that can be thrown at the assumed falsifiable but un-testable hypothesis.
By virtue of it's own definition, by virtue of the need to be falsifiable lest it be unscientific, positivism is falsified. Which should cause us to shed few tears. It was dead on arrival, a lie we told school children so they would stop thinking from the animistic. A way to look for causality in our reality that doesn't ascribe to this causality some supernatural entity. We never intended to find a special-case black-swan and then falsify our ideas about swans... instead we intend to contextualize our ideas about swans. (ie, they ARE black... when you cover them in oil).
The real change here is understanding that there is no observation out side the observer. Every scientific scrip should have the word "I" in it, with an attempt at explaining the bias of the I; if only because without it the tacit-bais of the "I" is left hidden. We are post-positivist in our behavior, in our science and we should be in our philosophy of science. I'm not saying that all reality is a word-game, as the post-modernist may argue, but I am saying that without understanding your own bias and assumptions (and then making them know) you fail to share the full and true context of your understanding.
Worse yet, you become bias in a way you assume is not bias, in a way that you never reflect on, in a way that never allows you to move into theory that transcends present understanding and truly extends our knowledge of the world.
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