<I used the word 'epistemology' because it has a conotation of how well we can know the TRUTH given the data at hand. Talking about statistics, statistical rules, etc loses sight of the fact that there is a fundamental limitation. We can debate the assumptions, and thus the size, of the multiple looks penalty - but at heart it is indisputably true that some kind of penalty is required to avoid false positives. False knowledge.>
Agree. But let's also not forget the other side of the coin, avoiding false negatives - true knowledge too quickly lost due to some limited thinking/evaluating process and/or, sometimes, the fear of false positives. Over many decades of work on computer tomography, we have learned that not all elephants must be lost because we only got limited impressions of them.
