# Proof Narrative: Presenting empirical spreadsheet observations as universal theorems violates the hypothetico-deductive method as defined by mainstream philosophy of science.

## Verdict

**Verdict: PROVED**

Three independent authoritative sources confirm that presenting spreadsheet observations as universal theorems omits requirements that the scientific method demands. The violation is structural, not a matter of opinion.

## What was claimed?

The original claim was that "math washing" a spreadsheet — treating patterns found in data as universal theorems — is valid scientific practice. That is a normative judgment that cannot be directly proved or disproved. So the claim was re-framed as a factual question: does this practice violate the hypothetico-deductive method, the dominant framework in mainstream philosophy of science? If it does, then whatever else might be said about the practice, it fails to meet a well-established standard for scientific reasoning.

## What did we find?

The hypothetico-deductive method has specific requirements, and three authoritative sources each identify a different one that this practice omits.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, summarizing Karl Popper's criterion of falsifiability, states that "a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false." Presenting spreadsheet observations as universal theorems makes no provision for falsifiability. The observations are treated as self-evidently true rather than as claims that could, in principle, be refuted.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in its article on scientific method, states that science "requires a logic as a system of reasoning for properly arranging, but also inferring beyond, what is known by observation." Observation alone is not enough. The practice of presenting data patterns as theorems treats observation as sufficient, skipping the step of forming hypotheses and deriving testable predictions from them.

The Catalog of Bias, maintained by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, defines data-dredging as "a distortion that arises from presenting the results of unplanned statistical tests as if they were a fully prespecified course of analyses." This is precisely the pattern: unplanned pattern-finding in a spreadsheet is presented as if it were a hypothesis-driven, prespecified result.

Each source addresses a distinct failure mode — falsifiability, reasoning beyond observation, and pre-specified analysis — and all three were verified by fetching the original pages and confirming the exact quoted text.

The proof also searched for counter-arguments. The strongest candidate was Bacon's inductivism, which defends generalizing from observations. But even Bacon's model requires systematic collection, replication, and bias elimination before generalizing — and no form of inductivism endorses calling data patterns "theorems," a term that implies deductive necessity. Exploratory Data Analysis was considered too, but Tukey's framework explicitly distinguishes hypothesis generation from hypothesis confirmation. No scientific domain was found that endorses presenting data patterns as universal theorems without further theoretical grounding.

## What should you keep in mind?

This proof is scoped to the hypothetico-deductive method specifically. It does not claim that the practice is invalid under every conceivable philosophy of science — only that it violates the dominant one. The term "universal theorem" is interpreted strictly: a claim of deductive necessity holding without exception, not a statistical regularity or empirical generalization.

The cited sources state general principles of the scientific method. None of them specifically names "spreadsheet observations presented as theorems." The connection between the general principles and the specific practice is an inference documented in the proof, not something stated directly by the sources.

One of the three sources — the Catalog of Bias — comes from a domain that is not classified in the credibility database, though it is maintained by Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. The proof's conclusion does not depend solely on this source.

## How was this verified?

This claim was evaluated by checking three independent authoritative sources on the requirements of the hypothetico-deductive method, then testing whether the practice of presenting empirical spreadsheet observations as universal theorems omits those requirements. All three citations were verified by live-fetching the source URLs and confirming the quoted text. Full details are in [the structured proof report](proof.md) and [the full verification audit](proof_audit.md). You can also [re-run the proof yourself](proof.py).
