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When you go to test a theory, you set up a null hypothesis saying, in the case, " The observations that have been made currently by our telescopes proves that inflation did not occur". Null hypotheses are generally the negative arguments to the theory you are testing. Now you have a basis on which to test the falseness of this assumption. You go through all the related observations and see whether what they've found either supports or rejects that negative notion. You do the maths and physics for the observations made, see if they support or reject the what you're trying to find. After all that work, you then discuss your findings with colleagues, modify whatever needs to be modified, retest everything and discuss again until you have come to a satisfactory conclusion that your theory holds, or the null hypothesis holds and then you propose your theory. If you reject it, then you modify it again and again, or reject it outright and look for something new.
That's what they call the Scientific Method.
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