CONCEPT
Falsifiability
Popper's criterion for genuine knowledge — a claim earns scientific status not by the evidence that confirms it but by specifying the conditions under which it would be false, and surviving attempts to produce those conditions.
Falsifiability is the single most influential criterion in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Popper proposed it in Logik der Forschung (1934) as the solution to the demarcation problem: what distinguishes genuine science from pseudoscience? His answer inverted three centuries of epistemological assumption. Science does not advance by accumulating confirmations. A million white swans cannot prove that all swans are white; a single black swan refutes the claim definitively. The asymmetry between verification and refutation is not a technicality. It is the engine of all knowledge-growth. A theory that has survived serious attempts to destroy it earns provisional trust. A theory that cannot specify what would refute it earns nothing — regardless of how sophisticated, how resonant, or how widely believed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The falsifiability criterion emerged from Popper's encounter with the intellectual culture of 1920s Vienna. He watched Marxists, Freudians, and Adlerians explain every possible observation as confirmation of their theories. Patient resists the