What's the difference between disprove and refute?

Disprove


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To prove to be false or erroneous; to confute; to refute.
  • (v. t.) To disallow; to disapprove of.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Tijuana, Mexico, has become a refuge for cancer patients who have been convinced that they may be cured of their terminal illness by unconventional, unproved, and disproved methods offered in the border clinics.
  • (2) Independent experts warn that rumours and deliberate misinformation about the regime are rife, partly because it is impossible to verify or disprove most stories about the tightly controlled country's elite.
  • (3) The best way to prove or disprove allegations of rights abuses is to allow independent media to probe the accusations.
  • (4) In Iran’s eyes, it is being asked by the IAEA to prove a negative, and disprove evidence it says is fabricated.
  • (5) If Kim has indeed been set aside – and nobody outside Pyongyang really knows – then whoever has taken power is not seeking the limelight,” said John Everard, former UK ambassador to Pyongyang.“The visits to factories and military units that Kim frequently conducted have not been taken over by anyone else; they have simply stopped.” “As a woman in a very male-dominated society, the theory goes, she might be reluctant to push herself forward publicly straight away, preferring instead to bide her time while governing from behind the scenes.” However, Everard says though it is “not impossible” that Kim Yo-jong has stepped up to the leadership, “it is as hard to disprove this theory as it is to find anything to support it”.
  • (6) The Iraqi government needs to “mock and disprove” Islamic State’s online propaganda more effectively and more quickly Malcolm Turnbull has told an elite audience in Washington, saying he will raise the problem when he meets US president Barack Obama.
  • (7) These conclusions must be considered tentative, pending other studies to disprove the presence of new molecular species with no change in net charge or size.
  • (8) Owing to the poor quality of much of this research the claims of the protagonists of these therapies cannot be proved or disproved.
  • (9) The hypothesis that ara C blocks or reduces further polymerisation after its incorporation into repair patches is disproved by our demonstration that, in permeable cells, the accumulated DNA breaks are ligated very rapidly.
  • (10) According to the New York Times , he told its reporter Emily Steel that if he did not approve of her resulting article “I’m coming after you with everything I have,” adding: “You can take it as a threat.” The 65-year-old anchor – who earlier dismissed the Mother Jones article as “total bullshit”, “disgusting”, “defamation” and “a piece of garbage” – had promised that the archive tapes would comprehensively disprove the charges against him.
  • (11) A generalised vasoconstriction, for almost a century believed to be the basis of all types of human hypertension, was disproved by recent haemodynamic studies.
  • (12) The difficulties of absolutely proving or disproving a protein error in these measurements are discussed, but our data are not consistent with protein being a source of error in measurements of ionized calcium.
  • (13) Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in "Frago 242" , which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to "note" them.
  • (14) These findings do not support a major role for free radical damage to muscle membranes in the initiation of injury from eccentric exercise, although they do not disprove free radical involvement in the etiology.
  • (15) These results exclude the possibility that the worm pairs had alternating periods of glycogen synthesis and degradation, and they also disprove the idea that synthesis and degradation occur at two different sites in the bloodstream of the hamster.
  • (16) This finding disproves the hypothesis that the increase in coital frequency is due to an increase in the proportion of women using oral contraceptives.
  • (17) The study disproved the hypothesis that exposure to cadmium would lead to an increase in blood pressure and in the prevalence of hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases.
  • (18) As Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, “The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.” The orgy of exceptionalism tales highlighted every Black History Month can undermine seeing the systemic oppressions still facing African Americans.
  • (19) A hypothesized collision between the H-wave and the antidromic M-wave component is not disproved but it (and the incumbent assumptions about relative afferent and efferent conduction velocities) is shown to be unnecessary.
  • (20) A retrospective study of the life events reported by 121 pregnant adolescents and 261 controls has disproved the null hypothesis that those 2 groups are 2 random samples from the same population.

Refute


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To disprove and overthrow by argument, evidence, or countervailing proof; to prove to be false or erroneous; to confute; as, to refute arguments; to refute testimony; to refute opinions or theories; to refute a disputant.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The operational meaning of all the resulting theorems is that when any of them appear to be refuted experimentally, the presence of more than one parallel transport pathway (that is, of membrane heterogeneity transverse to the direction of transport) can be inferred and analyzed.
  • (2) The results presented refute arguments that these enzymes proceed by a concerted mechansim and support the intermediacy of aminoacyladenylates.
  • (3) Theories of urea formation during allantoin degradation in Glycine max have been recently refuted.
  • (4) A mitochondriogenic mechanism of calcification could not be confirmed nor refuted by this study.
  • (5) The probability that the initial situation is correct--the proband and the cohabitant's six children are all legitimate-is "practically refuted": W = 0.03%.
  • (6) The IFS says similar declines emerge if you set the figure as low as 40% of median income – utterly refuting Nick Clegg's toxic line dismissing the threshold as just "poverty plus a pound" .
  • (7) Molly Prince, managing director of the company, refuted the Guardian story with some lustily expressed but random facts: "CPUK have not only purchased tents for everyone (some stewards wanted to use their own but it was too wet to put them up, they insisted in having a go!).
  • (8) The need for neighboring states to use their data to confirm or refute findings is stressed.
  • (9) Hume, whose grantmaking credentials include leading a £500m cancer and palliative care grant programme for the Big Lottery Fund, refutes the notion that hospices will lose out.
  • (10) Additional studies are highly desirable to confirm or refute these findings, which, if valid, mean increasing lung cancer hazards caused by a decrease in ventilation in future energy saving unless special measures are undertaken to reduce radon daughters in dwellings.
  • (11) This did not happen and, on the evidence presented in this paper, the Fry theory of the pathogenesis of the deviated nasal septum is refuted.
  • (12) Marshall refuted claims CSIRO was moving away from public good scientific research , labelling it disturbing and untrue.
  • (13) This explanation was refuted, as all thymic subpopulations were found to express CD1, albeit with differences in antigen density, whereas all extrathymic subpopulations lack CD1.
  • (14) Location of En at the MN locus would not, however, refute the theory that Wra and Wrb cannot function in the absence of En.
  • (15) The hypothesis that the function of recA gene is to convert the unidirectionally replicating machinery in the free state to the bidirectionally replicating one in the integrated state is refuted accordingly.
  • (16) Observation refutes Freud's often quoted statement that masturbation is further removed from the nature of women than of men.
  • (17) Use of such data led to a false impression of drug efficacy, an impression later refuted when proper control studies demonstrated that the range of disease was much greater than had been previously supposed.
  • (18) Results refute the assertion that people who stutter are more anxious or depressed than those who do not.
  • (19) The claim made by astrologers that people can be characterized according to their sign of the zodiac (sagitarius, taurus, cancer, scorpion) must be refuted.
  • (20) Predictions from the chiasma map can be confirmed or refuted only by genetic evidence for which the estimates of this paper serve as initial values to begin maximum likelihood iteration.