The Slippery Math of Causation

This other school-of-thought business (Bayesians vs. frequentists, pilot waves vs many worlds vs Copenhagen, everything like them) means choosing between different sets of words to describe the same thing. You are left with one of two cases: either they can be shown equivalent (in which case people are prone to keep on arguing over which one is better), or they are different (in which case one is wrong.)

At the far end of "models work very well and the epistemology is solid," physics solves this problem by assigning different people to each phenomenological class (organized by the engineering similarity of the experimental devices needed to probe them) and then using math to check that everyone's individual confirmation of the theory in their area fits in correctly to the bigger picture. As a result even though the frontier of physics is too large for any one person to know, the confirmation of the standard model has been built into an unbroken surface that reaches all the way from the highest energies achieved to chemistry and astronomy.

When you have a theory like that, you can prove mathematically that it is equivalent to other theories. Then, the enlightened can stop arguing about which one is "truer!" If you have two theories that only exist in the form of English sentences (this was true of psychology in Freud's era) I can't imagine what an equivalence proof would look like, even if it would be possible. Fields where you can't formalize anything tend to have philosophies that look more and more like critical theory as you move further and further from pure logic. At the far end, the empiricism is completely phenomenological and the theory is nothing but literature with no predictive power (and as a result, the only way to choose between them is by disguising aesthetic arguments as appeals to this-or-that). I can't think of any fields that didn't look like that in their infancy, and success has usually been associated with progress away from that.