The process of assimilating data whittles down a collection of plausible hypotheses. The results of an experiment may flatly contradict some hypotheses: we reject these. The results can also render some hypotheses less plausible without strictly contradicting them. Strictly, a `rejected' hypothesis has a plausibility: we may be extremely confident that we've interpreted our experiment correctly, but it would be rash to ignore the possibility that we're wrong. So the `rejected' hypothesis would formally be `negligibly plausible'.
Written by Eddy.