Eliezer, I think you're mistaken on the facts -- most theories take a lot of experimental anomaly before they get thrown out. For example, Kuhn, in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example (which I think is a much better work of history than philosophy, but anyway...), gives a marvelous description of "normal science" as just that -- tinkering with the dominant paradigm, fitting new results into it bit by bit, etc.