Quotes About Falsifiability

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible." 2 Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of "God" to deny or be skeptical about.

We must always couch our current scientific knowledge as "currently unfalsified.

In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.

Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of "falsifiability": A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.

if a proposition cannot be falsified, it is not scientific.

The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.

Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation.

As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions, the theory survives and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.

This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.

Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.

The process of testing claims is called science. Now, If you have a claim that can't be tested thats what we call pseudo-science. The difference between pseudo-science and science is whether or not you can test it.

Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.