Very interesting discussion is going on here and I would ask the moderators NOT to stop it by a premature lock.

I would just comment that in my opinion BOTH The Celtic Viking and cmacq are in some sense right.

In his original post The Celtic Viking briefly described the major points of the "critical rationalist" theory developed by Karl Popper. This is very much how things in science SHOULD be. While cmacq in his first post is very close to the decription of how the scientific "establishment" (sorry for my lack of a better word) works by T.S.Kuhn/P.K.Feyerabend, i.e. how things in science actually ARE.
Both narratives are legitimate and very powerful, and any buddying scientist will be well advised to familiarize with both of these major philosophies of the scientific process, preferaby in the major works of those authors themselves rather than by some epigones of theirs. But be aware, that both Popper on one side and Feyerabend and Kunh on the other are predominantly oriented towards the methodology of natural sciences or "the hard science" as physics. Even in this seemingly straightforward world of hypothesis-experiment-corroboration-falsification-etc. it is clear that neither of these big narratives is completely satisfactory. Rather both are to be used to provoke further thoght and make one to critically assess and refine his own methodology.
For instance we all know that world is NOT flat, but an brick-layer building a house coud safely rely on his builder´s level as if it was flat. We could still safely use old and disproven (falsified) newtonian physics to great benefit even after Einstein, and so on...

Now, as we on this forum have close to history and archeology, we are no longer on the completely same plane as the physicists are. In social sciences (Geistwissenschaften) it all becomes even more complicated. Here I would recommend as an introduction into thinging on what constitutes a historical fact and how historical narrative is construed to use E.H.Carr (What is history") or J. Le Goff (History and Memory) rather than "critical rationalism" of Popper or "revolutionary/anarchist" philosophy of science of Kuhn and Feyerabend.

I hope that this discussion will go on for a while, and I would welcome different views. The reason why I have posted this was just to illustrate my personal feeling that all of the diverging view that were posted before by other participants in this topic are - in my opinion - in some way an important part of modern scholarship and maybe actually not so diverging after all.

During my studies of history (Charles University, Prague) I was very disappointed by the extremely limited space which philosophy of science and historical methodology occupied in our curriculum.
I am now far away from being a historian, but I still find discussion on these issues refreshing and an great enrichment for me. I am looking forward for your further thoughts!