Evidence and Its Refutation

Generating a puzzle of the right kind requires a special kind of natural history or account as background. It is a history of the nature of things. In many cases, the same kind of thing is noted in such a record. But the same nature will be found to be present here and absent there, or found varying in degrees. A thing can have only one invariable nature. A description of many is paradoxical. It offers up a puzzle to solve, to which many more are added. Building a natural history creates a great puzzle about a small area of study. The narrative is, therefore, a refutation of familiar claims to knowledge. It is important that the experiments refute the existing evidence and not a hypothesis. We adduce other (experimental) evidence that creates puzzles in an old-fashioned, self-consistent natural history. We preserve the puzzle in a journal. Solved puzzles are breakthroughs in finding a hidden model or latent schematism that makes sense of all the weird evidence.