And while we're at it . . .
The social or "human" sciences can potentially sport a host of items that are too ambiguous to be subjected to robust refutation. (Like the humanities, many of its practitioners are often fans of everything intellectually descended from Marx and Freud -- a couple of the very things Popper selected as examples of dogmatic pseudoscience.)
And the "hard" or "natural" sciences are different in this regard? Is general relativity, for example, subject to a "robust refutation"? What would that look like? Is it not already
wildly at odds with observational evidence -- requiring patches such as
dark matter to maintain agreement with the evidence?
Since we're here, I'd point out in passing, as C C in surely already aware, that the
abandonment -- not to be confused with the (mythical?) definitive
falsification of a major scientific theory -- rarely, if ever, happens in the manner implied by those who speak of falsification.
What I mean is this: We're usually told that theories are compared against the evidence, and if the theory is at odds with what is observed then the theory has been falsified and must be abandoned.
But as the history of science bears witness time and time again, a major theory is
never abandoned -- regardless of its "fit" with the observable data --
until something else comes along. What typically happens is that the old theory will continue to be defended
until no one is left alive to defend it. Those who speak of definitive falsifications, then, have to address the awkward question of why apparently competent scientists continue to defend until their last gasp a theory that supposedly
has been shown to be false.
In summary, then, what leads to the abandonment of a (major) theory is not its failure to fit the facts, let alone a definitive
falsification, but rather that something else comes along that a growing number of scientists are attracted to, and who proceed to jump theoretical ships.
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