refutation
ref-yoo-TAY-shun
Definition
The act of proving a statement or theory to be false or incorrect through evidence or argument.
Etymology
Derived from the Latin 'refutare', meaning 'to drive back' or 'to rebut,' the word evolved through Middle French to enter English in the late 16th century.
In the news
The article states that a single study's results do not constitute a refutation of the entire field of relationship research, emphasizing that the author is questioning the predictive power of rules rather than dismissing the descriptive findings.
A divorce-prediction equation was 90 percent accurate on the data it was built from, but when it flagged a couple as heading for divorce in a fresh sample it was right only 29 percent of the time, which is the trouble with rules like these
Read the full article ↗ScienceBlog.com