Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he called the 'Fallacy of the Latest Word'. This 'fallacy' involves abandoning a theory 'as soon as it appears to have been empirically falsified'. He then asked, 'When are we to retain a hypothesis or theoretical conception in the face of facts that seem to refute it?'12 In answer, Merton quoted Imre Lakatos that 'There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory'.13 Thus, Merton proposed that a false explanation of some phenomenon is better than none. How absurd.