Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data. Experiments that Aristotle performed to demonstrate classical elemental theory are still valid and useful, his incorrect interpretation of the underlying mechanisms notwithstanding
> Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data.
Nonsense. Falsification of data happens all the time. But more importantly, falsification as applied to hypotheses and falsification as applied to data are two completely different concepts.
Falsification in the sense "we tried this, and got unexpected results, disconfirming our hypothesis" is something you do to hypotheses. This is Popperian falsification.
In the sense of what happens to data, falsification is "we tried this, and got data that disconfirmed our hypothesis. But instead of recording that data, we recorded spurious data which confirms our hypothesis". (Or, of course, "we didn't try anything, but here are some numbers that we feel reflect what would have happened if we had".) This is falsification in the same sense you'd see it applied to, say, accounting records.
Technically that is fallacious - a lie doesn't make the claim false it not being true does. Rarely frauds can be accidentally accurate.
It has a bit of a meta role I suppose - a system must be robust enough with replication that it shouldn't matter. Knowing bad actors are about can promote better verification practices than a blind trust.
Sure he did. He didn't follow the modern Bacon/Popper empirical method with testable hypotheses, but he still performed experiments and drew conclusions based on what he saw.
All beside the point: his observations are not invalid, his conclusions are
