Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed
The error is the assumption that facts are, well, facts. In real life, it's not nearly so black-and-white. Remember back in high school physics, when we did experiments with Newtonian physics, but our answers never quite worked with the theory - not just because of Einstein, but mostly because of (a) measurement error and (b) we were (knowingly or not) assuming point-masses on frictionless planes, etc.
As long as we were willing to write off our errors against those two sources, we could never discover that Newton's theories were incomplete, and we needed relativity to explain differences. We only got to that conclusion via models.
The way that you choose to measure fundamentally drives what your measurements are. And you can only decide what and how to measure if you start off with some model of the world.
Of course, this process of extraction of information from a data is lossy, almost never lossless (in some purely classification sciences it may be discrete and lossless, but it's a totally different story). Data is not perfect, and the required precision is always finite. Once you take it into account, you can think of the entire process of scientific discovery as a mechanical, dumb data compression.
So, the corrected wording for that paragraph should be the following:
Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true as long as their numeric predictions conform to all of the experimental facts within this theory supposed range, up to this theory supposed precision.
And a theory falsified by a new set of facts does not become immediately "false". It just get its range cut down to that range of facts where it is still giving an acceptable prediction precision.
Back to physics analogy, the phlogiston theory is still correct and true, as long as it is applied within the range of the phenomenological thermodynamics. But this does not happen in the classic economics - all those crazy theories are coming from the depths of an insane mind, not from any particular set of facts. They never had any specific range where they were known to be applicable. Therefore, phlogiston is science, and economic theory is not.
But if we were working entirely from observed measurements, we'd never have discovered relativity. It wasn't evident from the measurements you'd get from normal experimentation.
I mean, it is possible to measure the effect. But you need to first design the experiment in order to make the measurement. It was necessary for Einstein to sit and think for a long time, to come up with the idea, which others were able to design experiments around.
You can't just say that somebody would have noticed the discrepancy sooner or later. Really, doing experimentation that way is a statistical error, of the sort that's really plaguing the sciences these days.
As I explained elsewhere in this thread, the special relativity theory is a direct consequence of all the experimental evidence that existed on the electromagnetic phenomena. Formally merging Maxwell theory with the classical mechanics yields special relativity.
General relativity is an application of a well known extrapolation heuristics - the simplest possible generalisation of a model. The other possible generalisations were much more complex, and the nature for some reason tend to favour simplicity, so it was reasonable to go that way (as well as it is very reasonable now to go out and test all the possible extensions of the Standard Model, starting with the simplest ones).
Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed
The error is the assumption that facts are, well, facts. In real life, it's not nearly so black-and-white. Remember back in high school physics, when we did experiments with Newtonian physics, but our answers never quite worked with the theory - not just because of Einstein, but mostly because of (a) measurement error and (b) we were (knowingly or not) assuming point-masses on frictionless planes, etc.
As long as we were willing to write off our errors against those two sources, we could never discover that Newton's theories were incomplete, and we needed relativity to explain differences. We only got to that conclusion via models.
The way that you choose to measure fundamentally drives what your measurements are. And you can only decide what and how to measure if you start off with some model of the world.