I've been trained like a Pavlovian dog to use neutral, hedged language, because if you use stronger language in an academic article referees will usually attack you.
Like if you say, "This evidence proves..." you will get attacked endlessly. If you say, "This evidence is consistent with... " then you get a pass.
(For economics, where evidence is often suggestive at best.)
Even in physics, where evidence is supposed to be much less suggestive and be more of the absolute type, we also very much use hedged language. ChatGPT excels at hedging its statements ;)
reply