Since the truth and serious science can never be dismissed as a "sham", it is not possible to "debunk" either one.However, due to the huge pressure to win prestige (and tenure), and to publish, there have been highly documented istances of scientists falsifying finds or experimental results just to further their careers. How would we categorize
that? This from the Jan./Feb. 2002 issue of
Archaeology:
After Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was caught on camera planting artifacts at a Paleolithic site in 2000, he insisted he was guilty of perpetrating only one other hoax during a remarkably successful career in which he pushed back the earliest occupation of Japan to 600,000 years ago ("Hand of God Does the Devil's Work," Jan/Feb 2001). Now the disgraced archaeologist has come clean and admitted to faking discoveries on at least 42 Middle and Lower Paleolithic sites in Japan.
Charles Keally, an archaeologist at Sophias University, Tokyo, notes that these sites account for virtually the entire archaeological record in Japan before the Upper
Paleolithic. "This leaves us with our oldest evidence for human occupation of Japan at 35,000 years ago," he says. Japanese textbooks are already being revised.
Though Fujimura's precise whereabouts have not been made public, he is known to have checked into a psychiatric hospital. Another archaeologist, Mitsuo Kagawa, committed suicide last year after a magazine accused him of faking finds at the Paleolithic site of Hijiridaki Cave in Japan's Oita perfecture. His family is now suing the magazine that published the allegations.So I guess Fujimura actually debunked his own data by confessing to the falsification of evidence. How much similar fraud has been perpetrated by scientists over the years and actually entered into the scientific record? This act of deception is, of course, much easier to commit in the prehistoric sciences than, say, in chemistry or physics. Perhaps we'll never know. Distressing.
So, can you debunk an act of scientific fraud without actually knowing it's fraudulent until you arrive at your results...or just simply
disprove it? Or are we just splitting semantic straws here?
And, while I agree that the process of attempting to debunk or debunkery is always viable, I still assert that
arriving at an actual debunking in the case of a scientific theory is a misnomer because a theory, by nature, is constantly evolving. However, if you discover another element in water, let's say, you can then debunk the
fact that water is H20.
