Peter Lewis (2001) stated that the full survey of past theories — true and false, successful and unsuccessful — needed to settle scientific realism has never been attempted, and suggested why

philosophy-of-sciencesurvivorship-biasselection-effectspessimistic-inductionscientific-realismdenominator-problemargument-from-silenceunverified

In "Why the Pessimistic Induction is a Fallacy" (Synthese, 2001), the philosopher Peter Lewis states that the only way to decide whether the history of science supports or undermines convergent realism would be a complete census of past theories — the vindicated and the abandoned alike — and that no such census has ever been carried out: "Given that past theories are not automatically successful, the only way to ascertain whether the history of science supports convergent realism or undermines it would be to conduct a thorough survey of past theories, true and false, successful and unsuccessful. A moment's reflection on the difficulties of such a survey perhaps indicates why nothing like it has been attempted."

This is a direct precedent, stated 25 years before the vault reached the same conclusion for neuroscience, for the negative finding in claim-circuit-theory-vindication-lacks-denominator-survivorship-not-ruled-out: that "no source located in this search performs the survey that would settle the strong claim." The two arrive independently at one structural gap — Lewis framing it as realism-versus-truth across all of science, the vault as theory-versus-anatomy in one field — and both note that the missing work is the denominator, not a further confirmed instance. Magnus and Callender make the same point in their own voice immediately after the quotation, observing that "it is unlikely that there is any neutral way to count up past theories," and the base-rate structure Lewis's remark feeds is developed in claim-magnus-callender-2004-base-rate-fallacy-is-the-denominator-problem-generalized.

The claim is held at seedling because the quotation is read secondhand: Lewis's words are reproduced and page-cited inside the Tier-1 Magnus & Callender paper (itself fetched and quote-checked directly), not read from Lewis's own venue, which sits behind a Springer paywall. The primary read is routed to question-read-lewis-2001-and-laudan-1981-realism-primaries.