[voidhorse]

You are missing the point. Let me use "fabulashinaism" which is a theory I just made up that posits that the universe is made up of little gnomes called atoms.

There is a sense in which all of my observations hence will be "theory laden". When I seek "proof" i'm likely to do so within the constraints of fabulashinaism.

Science proceeds in the same way. Only crises, which are unpredictable and may have much more than simple "new data collected" behind them actually drive theory change. Beyond the theoretical assumptions, many of which are not proven but are constraining hypotheses, there are the social value assumptions I mentioned as well. As someone else said in the thread, science cannot prove science. You can be of the opinion that it's been more effective than alternatives, and I would agree, but there is no way to prove this because it is ultimately a question of theoretical assumptions and of values.

[GoblinSlayer]

Observable effectiveness can be demonstrated statistically. The only option I see is if it's unobservably ineffective, which can't be ruled out experimentally.