falsificationism
Noun
Meaning
falsificationism (uncountable)
(epistemology) A scientific philosophy based on the requirement that hypotheses must be falsifiable in order to be scientific; if a claim is not able to be refuted it is not a scientific claim.
Related terms
Examples
Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
Lakatos, Musgrave ed. (1970), Pg. 130 The continued adherence to a programme's 'hard core', augmented with adaptable auxiliary hypotheses, reflects Lakatos's less strict standard of falsificationism.
Hempel came to acknowledge that Logical Positivism's verificationism was untenable, but argued that falsificationism was equally untenable on logical grounds alone.
On the other hand, he strictly opposed the view that non-falsifiable statements are meaningless or otherwise inherently bad, and noted that falsificationism does not imply it.
Popper's own falsificationism, thus, is not only an alternative to verificationism, it is also an acknowledgement of the conceptual distinction that previous theories had ignored.
Rather, it is methodological only in that theories are only abandoned according to a methodical progression from worse theories to better theories—a stipulation overlooked by what Lakatos terms "dogmatic falsificationism".