I'll give you that it's a bit of an idealistic view, to be filed under "epistemology". It is my understanding that margins of error in reproducible rates are o

I'll give you that it's a bit of an idealistic view, to be filed under "epistemology". It is my understanding that margins of error in reproducible rates are on-par with our limits in engineering capabilities to 'test' experimentally. The validation becomes statistic because the real world is too chaotic/complex/whatever external cause, but the sum of evidence must tend to show (mean, SD, etc) that the theory applies to the real world, and predicts "a range of possible within some margin of error", which in practice results from our imprecisions. E.g. how we continuously prove Einstein's GR. Quantum uncertainty is a whole other paradigm which I don't think can be discussed in the same terms; a lot of our 'logic' does not apply and thus I'd rather refrain from using classical frameworks of thinking to even characterize it. But the fact stands that you should always be able to verify experimentally a valid theory; our failure in practice, sometimes, has nothing to do with theory. Social sciences look at category of problems considered "hard" by any scientific metric because of their complexity. It's like meteorology and indeed astrophysics, we lack the processing power (both our brains and computers, for now) to go all-in on theory. I was however surprised, in my studies, that the more down-to-earth approach of anthropology (naive, dare I say seeking first principles) seemed to yield observation 'closer' to theory than its modern sister sociology, whose subtopic —the modern world, as opposed to very specific cultures for a quite narrow spacetime— is vastly too multi-factorial to even begin to modelize, let alone theorize.