Not to belabor the point, but formal debate is initiated on a falsifiable premise: "Resolved that ...". So though we ordinarily think of hypothesis testing as being somehow mathematical, it isn't necessarily so.

And the same with scientific hypotheses. Evolution, for example, is still mostly within the domain of spoken language rather than mathematics. Which brings us full-circle. The major problem with evolutionary theory is that the theory is difficult to present as a falsifiable hypothesis. It isn't even inductively arguable except in very narrow circumstances. Instead, it is correlative (as is most of economics ...) and is abductively argued. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

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