  We present a methodological argument to refute the so-called many-worlds
interpretation (MWI) of quantum theory. Several known criticisms in the
literature have already pointed out problematic aspects of this interpretation,
such as the lack of a satisfactory account of probabilities, or the huge
ontological cost of MWI. Our criticism, however, does not go into the technical
details of any version of MWI, but is at the same time more general and more
radical. We show, in fact, that a whole class of theories--of which MWI is a
prime example--fails to satisfy some basic tenets of science which we call
facts about natural science. The problem of approaches the likes of MWI is
that, in order to reproduce the observed empirical evidence about any concrete
quantum measurement outcome, they require as a tacit assumption that the theory
does in fact apply to an arbitrarily large range of phenomena, and ultimately
to all phenomena. We call this fallacy the holistic inference loop, and we show
that this is incompatible with the facts about natural science, rendering MWI
untenable and dooming it to be refuted.
