Refinement as an Immunizing Mechanism: A Topological Model of Weak Falsifiability in the Humanities and Social Sciences

The humanities and many social-scientific theories exhibit a distinctive epistemic profile: they often remain explanatorily rich while being difficult to falsify in a stringent Popperian sense. This paper proposes a structural account of that phenomenon. The central claim is that a theory in a weakly constrained domain can be progressively refined—by concept splitting, exception carving, mechanistic supplementation, and interpretive re-description—in a way that preserves or even improves local explanatory fit while reducing global vulnerability to refutation. To make this idea precise, we model theories as nodes in a preorder of semantic and inferential refinements. Using the language of topological coverings, a coarse theory is treated as an open cover of a phenomenon-space, and refinement is understood as passing to a finer cover that partitions the same explananda more delicately. The key result is not that every theory can be refined into truth, but that in domains with high semantic elasticity and low constraint density, refinement is cheap enough that ad hoc accommodation of anomalies becomes systematically available. We show that this mechanism helps explain why humanities and social-scientific theories often display weak falsifiability without collapsing into mere arbitrariness. The paper concludes by identifying empirical and methodological implications, including criteria for distinguishing productive refinement from degenerative immunization.