The problem is that this--not when trying to decide whether a novel ion channel is in part responsible for the duration of the action potential refractory period in some subclass of GABAergic neurons in layer 4--is when you need philosophical grounding for your epistemology. And philosophers can be pretty good at that.

Science proceeds usefully not just by falsification; you might need odds ratios, you might be accumulating data that doesn't have a hypothesis associated, you might have a model that's wrong in exquisitely precise detail ("falsified") but still useful, and so on and so forth. But if you can't even conceptually wrangle things into a falsificationist-like framework (which you don't actually use because it's clunky and inefficient), you're probably not doing science.

Indeed, this area you call out is a philosophical topic typically called the "demarcation problem" (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/).