The difference would be that with Newton his results applied to pretty much all observable situations and only when our observation ability improved did we disc

The difference would be that with Newton his results applied to pretty much all observable situations and only when our observation ability improved did we discover problems where his work wouldn't replicate and we had to tighten the specification of what his work applied to. In this regard you could also call the problem in the social sciences a specification crisis because their claims don't hold up over the wide group they attempt to apply them to in the results discussion (I would argue far too often they don't apply beyond the x people in the study, but that's open for debate). I agree, we shouldn't stop trying. We do, however, need to be aware of the things we are doing to be utter failures and correct them, otherwise nothing will come from trying.