Karl Popper's position, set out in Logik der Forschung (1934, translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery), that what marks a theory as scientific is not that evidence can confirm it but that it makes risky predictions capable of being refuted by observation. Popper proposed falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between science and non-science or pseudo-science, arguing that no amount of confirming instances can prove a universal law true, while a single genuine counterinstance can prove it false, so science progresses by conjecturing bold theories and rigorously attempting to refute them rather than by accumulating confirmations. Critics including Quine, via the Duhem-Quine thesis, and Kuhn argued that auxiliary hypotheses let almost any theory be protected from a single falsifying observation, complicating the clean falsification Popper described.
Facts
Origin YearKarl Popper, Logik der Forschung, 1934; translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959. Connections
Associated With
Source Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In Branch
Sources
1. Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Karl Popper, section on falsifiability
Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century.
Karl Popper, on Logik der Forschung
Popper published Logik der Forschung in 1935, which was later translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
- Associated With: Karl Popper
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