The emergence of such analysis has been attributed to a method that, like that of the physical sciences, permits refutable implications testable by standard statistical techniques.
Because of the two meanings of the word undecidable, the term independent is sometimes used instead of undecidable for the neither provable nor refutable sense.
Theorems derived in welfare economics, he notes, are deductive implications of assumptions that are not refutable, thus not meaningful in a certain sense.