> it gets tricky in cases where you're deciding between facts whose enclosing theories are incompatible. Is gravity a force, or is it an acceleration?

This isn't deciding between facts. It's deciding between different theoretical interpretations of the same facts. The facts of gravity didn't change when Einstein discovered General Relativity. All that changed was the theoretical model.

> Your epistemology appears to allow for the absoluteness of facts to be itself an absolute fact.

I don't know what you mean by "facts" if facts aren't absolute. Once you do an experiment and record certain results, those results don't change. That's why we call them facts.

If you are claiming that those facts can change when we change theoretical models, I have no idea why you believe that. If you're agreeing that those facts don't change when we change theoretical models, then at least we agree on that, and then it's just a matter of me thinking your use of language is highly idiosyncratic.

> If one highschool uses textbooks that acknowledge that the philosophy of science is not itself a science--and presents the various competing views, and another highschool uses textbooks that assert the absolute truth of scientific facts without justification--which highschool produces more parents that opt their children out of vaccinations?

You're assuming that opting children out of vaccinations is necessarily a bad thing. But it might not be.

Consider: when you vaccinate someone, there is a balance between two risks. If the person is vaccinated, there is some probability that they will suffer harm due to the vaccination. If the person is not vaccinated, there is some probability that they will suffer harm from catching the disease the vaccine protects against.

In the world of half a century ago, when I was getting all the usual shots as a child, the second risk was demonstrably much higher than the first, because all of those diseases were common enough that the probability of catching them if you weren't vacccinated was significant, while the probability of suffering harm due to the vaccine was small (but not zero).

But in the world of today, where all of those diseases are extremely rare--precisely because of such a huge fraction of the population getting vaccinated in the past--the probability of catching the disease if you aren't vaccinated is much lower. So now even a much lower probability of some kind of harm from the vaccine itself can justify not getting vaccinated. And since probabilities that low are very hard to assess anyway, it is by no means unreasonable for some parents to be unwilling to vaccinate their children without having to have any wacky beliefs. For example, if a parent has a concern about the mercury in thimerosal (a common preservative used in vaccines), even if the risk of that harm is low, it might still be enough for a reasonable parent not to take the risk.

Note that this logic also allows parents to adjust to further changes, such as the recent increase in incidence of a number of diseases like measles. Such an increase pushes the tradeoff back towards vaccination even if there are low probability risks from the vaccine that haven't been fully quantified.