falsification

falsification, falsificationism
To falsify a knowledge-claim is to provide evidence that it is false. Since the time of David Hume, empiricist philosophy of science has struggled with the problem of induction: namely, how is it possible to justify inference, from a finite set of instances, to the truth of a universal law whose scope is potentially infinite? In the absence of a convincing answer to this question, our everyday and scientific belief in a regular, ordered, and predictable universe must seem to be a physiologically indispensable, but still irrational, habit of mind.

The original approach to this problem pioneered by Karl Popper involved a reasoned rejection of the question itself. Popper accepted that the problem of induction was insoluble, but it did not follow that science was irrational, or that it could not progress. Instead...

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