Why is falsification important

Reasoning Philosophy Ethics History. Psychology Biology Physics Medicine Anthropology. Martyn Shuttleworth , Lyndsay T Wilson Karl Popper's Basic Scientific Principle Falsifiability, according to the philosopher Karl Popper, defines the inherent testability of any scientific hypothesis. Don't miss these related articles:. Back to Overview "Reasoning". Next Article » "Verification Error".

Full reference:. Want to stay up to date? Follow us! Follow ExplorableMind. Save this course for later Don't have time for it all now? No problem, save it as a course and come back to it later. Add to my courses. Footer bottom Links. The Research Council of Norway. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises because credible experts use comprehensive bodies of evidence to arrive at consensus judgments about whether a theory should be retained or rejected in favor of a new one.

These consensus judgments are what have enabled the astounding levels of success that have revolutionized our lives for the better. It is the preponderance of evidence that is relevant in making such judgments, not one or even a few results. So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Now, some physicists and philosophers think it is time to reconsider the notion of falsifiability. As theory pulls further and further ahead of the capabilities of experiment, physicists are taking this question seriously.

Case in point: String theory. The darling of many theorists, string theory represents the basic building blocks of matter as vibrating strings. The strings take on different properties depending on their modes of vibration, just as the strings of a violin produce different notes depending on how they are played.

To string theorists, the whole universe is a boisterous symphony performed upon these strings. Popper argued that all observation is from a point of view, and indeed that all observation is colored by our understanding. The world appears to us in the context of theories we already hold: it is 'theory-laden'. Popper proposed an alternative scientific method based on falsification.

However many confirming instances there are for a theory, it only takes one counter observation to falsify it. Science progresses when a theory is shown to be wrong and a new theory is introduced which better explains the phenomena. Popper does think that science can help us progressively approach the truth but we can never be certain that we have the final explanation.

According to the time-honored view, science, properly so called, is distinguished by its inductive method — by its characteristic use of observation and experiment, as opposed to purely logical analysis, to establish its results. The great difficulty was that no run of favorable observational data, however long and unbroken, is logically sufficient to establish the truth of an unrestricted generalization. Popper's astute formulations of logical procedure helped to reign in the excessive use of inductive speculation upon inductive speculation, and also helped to strengthen the conceptual foundation for today's peer review procedures.

However, the history of science gives little indication of having followed anything like a methodological falsificationist approach. Indeed, and as many studies have shown, scientists of the past and still today tended to be reluctant to give up theories that we would have to call falsified in the methodological sense; and very often it turned out that they were correct to do so seen from our later perspective.