[tdehnel]

Duh, science is the interplay between observations and explanations. But that doesn’t change that what makes an explanation good or bad is whether it’s hard to vary.

I’ll use a David Deutsch example: let’s say a theory that eating 1kg of grass cures the common cold.

You could do an experiment and find it does not. But you could easily vary the theory and say actually it’s 1.1kg and so on.

But you wouldn’t actually need to do the experiment because there is no good, invariable explanation as to _why_ eating the grass cures a cold.

In that case, you wouldn’t need any data or observations at all. You could simply ask why eating exactly 1kg of grass cures the cold. What is the mechanism of action?

In this way you can see that empiricism is not sufficient in any case to give evidence to a theory. We need only a good explanation to judge whether a theory is worth considering to be true. From there, we can do further experiments/observations to rule it out. But never to prove it true.