Falsificationism

Falsificationism is Karl Popper's account of what separates science from non-science: a theory counts as scientific only if it makes predictions that could, in principle, be shown false by observation or experiment. Popper set out the position in Logik der Forschung, published in German in 1934 with a 1935 imprint, and in the expanded English translation, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in 1959. He argued that scientific claims can never be proven true by piling up confirming observations, since a universal statement is never fully verified by any finite set of instances, but a single reliable counterexample can refute one outright. On this view science does not progress by gathering support for theories but by proposing bold conjectures and then attempting, as rigorously as possible, to refute them; a theory that survives serious attempts at refutation is called corroborated rather than proven, and remains open to being overturned by a later test.