...My point, which I take to be in agreement with your position, is that the contrast between "fact" and "theory," while it can be illuminating in some instances of scientific research, can be difficult or impossible to apply without conceptual confusion in other instances. Certainly the idea of a fixed and global distinction between one part of science that is "fact" and another that is "theory" is untenable.
Yes, precisely. I was hypocritical when I said that the 1000 year old notion was wrong. It was simply less right than what Newton proposed. And lest we think Newton was completely right, it turns out that Newton's Laws of motion are less right than the laws of motion that come from Relativity. They only coincide when nothing is moving (which poses a problem for a law of motion.)
But yes, that is why I said that all findings and theories are provisional and are accepted only on the basis that their falsifiable predictions show to be more accurate than those from competing theories. We have no other way to determine the truth of a theory but to simply determine that it is more useful than its competition.
So although our prevailing theory for motion is Relativity, we also expect that it will run into predictive trouble somewhere and have to either be modified or replaced by another theory.
This might seem like a big problem, but consider that even Newton's Laws are "right enough" that we still use them for just about everything we do in terms of calculating motion and force. We still use Newtonian Mechanics for celestial navigation.
The error in Newtonian Mechanics as compared to Relativity starts out as zero when nothing is moving, but as objects move faster they take on relativistic mass exponentially which goes assymptotic at the speed of light.
The effect is so small as to be unnoticeable for most things in motion, even speeding planets. But we could not focus the very fast moving electrons in a picture tube properly using only Newtonian Physics. A relativistic correction is needed to get that right.
So one has to consider the "relativity of right". Although Newtonian Mechanics is not completely right, it has served us in almost all cases of motion of everything we have ever been concerned with for 400 years with astonishing precision. In fact we didn't even notice the discrepancy until another theory (Maxwell's Equations for electromagnetism) showed a logical inconsistency with Newton.
It was a pretty big deal, because in 1860, this new EM theory was already describing everything we knew about EM fields including every observation we ever made about light. It placed Newton's theory in a kind of predictive crisis for a few decades until Einstein came a long and proposed Relativity.
Relativity would have been dismissed as someone's opium nightmare, except for the fact that its predictive powers covered all of the predictions of Newtonian Mechanics, corrected the error as things started moving faster, and completely solved the Maxwell/Newton crisis.
This is how science works. Einstein was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent office but when he published his work, it was clear that it made definitive falsifiable predictions that made it completely testable under more conditions than Newton. And it made predictions about nature that no one ever even imagined. Since all those predictions proved to be more accurate than anything else, career physicists gave the 400 year Newtonian world over to Einstein.
It only took a few decades as the predictions were proven out, and it happened during the careers of well established scientists. If anyone wants to call that dogma, then they need their head examined. Empirical truth always wins in science but it only wins based on its superior predictive power and maintains its title only as long as it can remain superior in prediction.
One can complain that scientific theories are never completely right, but you cannot say that they are "righter" than almost any other way of knowing something.
