Scientific Error and Error Handling

Error is a common part of scientific practice, which must be accounted for by scientonomy. A scientific error occurs when an agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method. One might suspect that the handling of scientific error seems to violate the theory rejection theorem according to which a theory becomes rejected only when other theories that are incompatible with the theory become accepted, because it appears as though a theory isn’t replaced by anything. Here, we analyze several instances of scientific error and show that error handling, when properly analyzed, is fully consistent with the theory rejection theorem. We show that instances of scientific error typically involve the rejection of an erroneous conclusion as well as one or more of the premises of the argument that leads to that erroneous conclusion. In most cases, first-order propositions of the original erroneously accepted theory are replaced by other first-order propositions incompatible with them. In some cases, however, first-order propositions are replaced by second-order propositions asserting the lack of sufficient reason for accepting these first-order propositions. In both cases, such a replacement is fully consistent with the theory rejection theorem.