What's the difference between rebuttal and refutation?

Rebuttal


Definition:

  • (n.) The giving of evidence on the part of a plaintiff to destroy the effect of evidence introduced by the defendant in the same suit.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Already much work has been done to re-establish enduring components for Labour's electoral success: clarity of strategy, effective rebuttal, and superior field organisation with our network of community organisers.
  • (2) "The law states specifically that this provision does not give the suspect the right to have copies of case files," the prosecutors said in their rebuttal.
  • (3) The cleanliness of Kigali is a pleasing rebuttal to Forbes’ list, which declared in 2007 that the cleanest cities in the world were “largely located in countries noted for their democracy and their industrialisation” and that there are “no top-25 clean cities in South or Central America, Africa and Australia”.
  • (4) Fiorina’s own rebuttal to the Iran deal may have been lacked any detail but it packed a rhetorical punch.
  • (5) The format only allows for one-minute responses and a 30-second rebuttal if we are attacked by name, so probably a lot of us will be sitting there hoping we get attacked by name so we can get a little more time,” said Huckabee in an interview on CBS.
  • (6) If, as looks likely, Carswell wins a byelection on 9 October , Farage will have a neat rebuttal to Cameron’s warning that voting Ukip lets Labour in by the back door.
  • (7) I did so in part after soliciting and receiving this response to the center’s mock “nutrition label” for the salmon from Ron Stotish, CEO of AquaBounty, on 27 June: Rebuttal of Center for Food Safety AquAdvantage (AAS) Salmon composition label: In the United States, the average height of a student entering the third grade is 45 inches.
  • (8) These films were a blithe rebuttal of the critic Edward Said’s insight that, in a novel like Mansfield Park, the “English” story necessarily concealed the story, located elsewhere but inextricable from the main narrative, of a West Indian sugar plantation.
  • (9) The strategy backfired within hours because, with just a few sentences, Miliband gave a truly prime ministerial rebuttal: “Michael Fallon’s a decent man but today I think he has demeaned himself and he’s demeaned his office.
  • (10) This was not our intention – a fix for this is already under way,” wrote Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of policy for Europe in a rebuttal.
  • (11) He said: "The tone and language of the report is quite shocking, but it was equally a very firm rebuttal from Standard Chartered to say it was acting lawfully and measuring what they think was outside the rules."
  • (12) But whether the attacks are fair when it comes to Trump or not, Clinton was able to stick them without a strong rebuttal from her opponent.
  • (13) Yet I have never seen a sustained rebuttal of his argument, because it’s essentially true.
  • (14) It's a brisk rebuttal of a recent research paper which argued that the fiscal consolidation being imposed on European countries was largely the fault of the "fear and panic that erupted in the financial markets".
  • (15) The legal concept of "rebuttable presumption" should be used to reconceive the traditional requirement of a uniform standard of care.
  • (16) That prompted an immediate response from Anderson on Twitter and the mayor issued a more comprehensive rebuttal of Everton’s accusations on Tuesday.
  • (17) Tory missteps and gaffes go ignored and unpunished, where, in the Alastair Campbell era of rapid rebuttal, they would have been seized on ruthlessly.
  • (18) She scathingly noted that the state’s rebuttal to Warner’s petition had depended largely on a scientific expert who claimed that midazolam was effective in executions but had cited no studies, but instead appeared to have drawn his information from the website drugs.com .
  • (19) @StateDept with another rebuttal of #Russian authorities claims.
  • (20) In his rebuttal, he said that they were the "usual tired obfuscation and generalisation".

Refutation


Definition:

  • (n.) The act or process of refuting or disproving, or the state of being refuted; proof of falsehood or error; the overthrowing of an argument, opinion, testimony, doctrine, or theory, by argument or countervailing proof.

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.