> Philosophy, history, literature, and human languages My claim was that some fields avoid data altogether so that they can't really be "disproved", only disag

> Philosophy, history, literature, and human languages My claim was that some fields avoid data altogether so that they can't really be "disproved", only disagreed with. But in these cases, there are rigorous approaches that rely on data: e.g. analytic philosophy, rigorous history, linguistics, etc. and those approaches generally have a large impact. In linguistics, Chomsky made such a huge impact on human languages because he had developed a rigorous grammar and was able to find counterexamples to many of the existing hypotheses. Chomsky had made testable hypotheses, which could only be backed up or disproven by rigorously studying human languages. And the most recent counterexamples to his grammar (e.g. that some languages lack subordinate clauses) augment rather than disprove it. Similarly, advances in philosophy largely came from rigorous approaches -- Russell's attempts to formalize logic (and somewhat subsequent failure) resulted in Wittgenstein's formalization of the relationship to language, which had a huge impact on subsequent philosophy.