[mb7733]

To roughly repeat myself from a sibling comment: I may have been unclear. I didn't claim that the only way to disprove something in a constructive system is to produce a counterexample.

The part that I was referring to was the last statement from the OP: that "a proof of existence of a counterexample necessarily provides more insight than a counterexample". I can't imagine a constructivist would agree with that in general.

[antonvs]

I'm the OP. In the cases where a proposition can be refuted by a proof that doesn't involve counterexamples, by its nature that proof will tell you something about the reason that the proposition is false.

Whereas a counterexample, on its own, proves the proposition false but doesn't necessarily tell you anything else.

The real difference in the constructive case is that there are fewer classes of proposition for which a proof without witnesses is possible.

(Edit: side note, I didn't explicitly say "necessarily" in my original comment. I suppose there could be exceptions, although I'm struggling to think of an example. Constructively speaking, the ball is in your court!)

[Jweb_Guru]

I think maybe a better way of explaining it would be that an uninformative proof by definition needs to be based on proving that the set under consideration must be inhabited without ever defining an object in that set. This generally means you must show the set is inhabited by exploring some abstract properties of the set itself. A single counterexample, by contrast, by itself is a direct proof that the set is inhabited, so you don't necessarily learn any other interesting properties about the set. So it's not really about constructive vs. non-constructive, I think it's closer to e.g. the idea that point-free stuff tends to be more beautiful and meaningful than pointed stuff (which I think most mathematicians would agree with and which really has nothing to do with intuitionism per se).

In this case, I think part of the problem is that there was kind of no good reason to think the Jacobian conjecture was true in > 2 dimensions other than it being kind of hard to find counterexamples. So a really interesting disproof would be one that, e.g., was able to exhaustively classify the counterexamples, or showed why it seemed in practice to be hard to come up with functions violating the conjecture. AFAIK, this doesn't really accomplish either of those things, not even after you learn the procedure that constructed the function -- it kind of tells you why we should have expected to find a counterexample but not how rare such counterexamples are.