It’s more “the replicability and applicability of my data can beat your data”.
Science is ultimately tested by empiricism; although non-scientific biases can exert strong influence in the short term, in the longer term flawed findings are excluded by reality.
Scientists who base future experiments on prior errors find that their experiments don’t work properly; this creates a selective pressure towards the more accurate theory over the long term. That’s what eventually killed phlogiston theory; it made it impossible to do advanced chemistry successfully.
Longino’s Science as Social Knowledge is the standard modern book on this. It’s good stuff.
Certainly.
But debate is almost never a good way of finding the right answer. It’s a good way of distributing the right answer, but getting it in the first place requires other methods.
They’re perenially troublesome, but they aren’t the source of the current problem.
The current problem is fascism. To which there are answers, but they are very much not easy.
