preview

Popper Falsification

Decent Essays
Open Document

Popper termed the idea of falsification as a means of separating science from non-science. The separation of science and non-science became known as the problem of Demarcation. He believed that any theory was scientific on the basis that such theories could have possible evidence to suggest that the theory was wrong. Conversely, a notion would be deemed unscientific if no contradictory evidence could be gathered. An example of Demarcation is the separation of Einstein's theory of relativity and Freud's psychoanalytic theory (section 2). Popper saw Einstein's theory as making predictions that could potential be incorrect and that such examples would falsify the entire theory. Conversely, Freud's psychoanalytic theory was capable of explaining most of human behavior without contradictory evidence. …show more content…

Because of this, using observations cannot completely verify a theory, it would only verify what a scientist would be looking for. On the other hand, searching for counterexamples to a theory can falsify the theory. In addition, falsification allows more questions to be raised to search for contradiction evidence. This search for falsification of a theory is consequently a better methodology for separating science from non-science(section 3). In addition, Popper believed all scientific theories as being tests for falsification and not verification. This extends into the idea that no theory is a universal truth, but only that contradictory evidence has not been found for such a

Get Access