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 a few lines earlier, 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.