Laudan's 1981 catalog of successful-but-false theories — the anti-realist denominator attempt — was challenged for not being big or representative enough within a few years, and that representativeness fight has stayed live since the 1980s

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Larry Laudan's "A Confutation of Convergent Realism" (Philosophy of Science, 1981) assembled a list of historically successful theories later judged false or non-referring — crystalline spheres, humoral medicine, phlogiston, the caloric theory of heat, the optical and electromagnetic ethers — and used it to argue that failure is the historical norm: "I daresay that for every highly successful theory in the past of science which we now believe to be a genuinely referring theory, one could find half a dozen once successful theories which we now regard as substantially non-referring." That is itself a denominator-shaped move — an attempt to count failures against successes rather than reason from the vindicated cases alone.

Realist philosophers challenged the representativeness of the list almost at once. Stathis Psillos's synthesis of that response (Scientific Realism, 1999, ch. 5) reports: "This kind of argument can be challenged by observing that the inductive basis is not big and representative enough to warrant the pessimistic conclusion," crediting the objection to Michael Devitt (1984) and Ernan McMullin (1984), and noting the basis can be eroded by querying whether all the listed theories were in fact successful and whether they were representative of their domains. The exact move the vault's circuit-theory note is cautious about — generalizing from a curated list of cases to a claim about a field as a whole — has therefore been the subject of a named, explicit methodological fight in general philosophy of science for over forty years, entirely independent of systems neuroscience.

This is the other side of the denominator problem traced in claim-lewis-2001-no-full-denominator-survey-of-past-theories-ever-attempted and formalized in claim-magnus-callender-2004-base-rate-fallacy-is-the-denominator-problem-generalized: Lewis says no neutral census exists; Laudan built the most influential partial one from the failure side; the realists answered that a partial census drawn this way is exactly the sampling worry at issue. It bears directly on claim-circuit-theory-vindication-lacks-denominator-survivorship-not-ruled-out and sits in the moc-argument-from-silence cluster. The claim is held at seedling: the representativeness-challenge wording is read directly in a scanned mirror of Psillos (Tier 2), but Laudan's own 1981 sentence is read secondhand via Magnus & Callender, and Devitt's and McMullin's primary texts were not read.