142 Sentences With "falsifiable" | Random Sentence Generator

One way to define a delusion is an individually held, falsifiable belief.

Political scientists prefer to answer questions that are falsifiable — is credibility real?

But Popper's insistence that scientific theories must be falsifiable led Soroush ultimately to reject Khomeini's doctrines.

That said, a nice part of this research is that the results are "fully falsifiable by future discoveries," he added.

The oft-repeated statement that "trans women are women" is closer to an assertion of personal belief than a falsifiable scientific fact.

The problem with her myriad of "free" giveaways is it's unbelievably naïve and empirically falsifiable to think the federal government is more cost-efficient than the free market.

Ito, the director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, and Howe, a visiting scholar there, are more careful to avoid the kind of futurist fortunetelling that ends in discrete, falsifiable predictions.

This wrongheaded, empirically falsifiable obsession with deterring crime by coming down hard on the most minor among them — once called "broken windows," though more aptly called "broken families" — has bled to the border.

"It's only possible to pursue anything legally if the patient has identified himself or herself, and they have stated as fact something that is falsifiable," Hillowe says, adding that viable defamation cases in this area are rare.

Some viewers may be tempted to believe it's because all three candidates are clueless on these issues, but it's the clueless candidates who can often answer questions the most clearly and confidently — just listen to Donald Trump the next time he says something easily falsifiable.

The reference to those reports is in a separate section detailing not Mr. Page's Russian contacts but his public denials — potentially relevant if they included independently falsifiable claims — and a partly redacted footnote suggests the F.B.I. understood those articles to be indirectly derived from Mr. Steele's work.

Conversely, conflict theory is empirically falsifiable and thus, distinct from Marxism (Cao, 2003).

Lakatos add two other decisions. One of them is needed to accept statistical statements as falsifiable. The other allows even more falsifiable theories. The falsifiers thus depend on decisions made by scientists in view of the currently accepted technology and its associated theory.

See List of scientific laws for falsifiable laws that are said to apply universally and literally.

The law is falsifiable and more useful if we specify an upper bound on melting points or a way to calculate this upper bound. Another example from Maxwell is "All beta decays are accompanied with a neutrino emission from the same nucleus." This is also not falsifiable, because maybe the neutrino can be detected in a different manner. The law is falsifiable and much more useful from a scientific point of view, if the method to detect the neutrino is specified.

This would be a major revolution in physics and would possibly make the cosmic landscape string theory Popper falsifiable.

Popper's view is that it is indeed useful, but only because it is indirectly corroborated by the corroboration of the falsifiable law "All men die before the age of 150." For Popper, if no such a falsifiable law exists, then the metaphysical law is not useful, because it's not indirectly corroborated. Clyde Cowan conducting the neutrino experiment (circa 1956) Maxwell also used the example "All solids have a melting point." This is not falsifiable, because maybe the melting point will be reached at a higher temperature.

Instead, he favored a "survival of the fittest" view in which the most falsifiable scientific theories are to be preferred.

Alternative pictures including a Big Bounce may provide a predictive and falsifiable possible solution to the horizon problem, and are under active investigation as of 2017.

Dessau (1916) and (1918). Other scholars either reject this or regard it as unprovable.Mohrmann (1975) xiii; Schmidt (1997) 434 "weder verifizierbar noch auch falsifizierbar" ("neither verifiable nor falsifiable").

The same is true for the term "falsifiable". Popper said that he only uses "falsifiability" or "falsifiable" in reference to the logical side and that, when he refers to the methodological side, he speaks instead of "falsification" and its problems. Popper said that methodological problems require proposing methodological rules. For example, one such rule is that, if one refuses to go along with falsifications, then one has retired oneself from the game of science.

When it is specified, namely, fitness in polluted industrial areas vs non polluted areas, then the law is falsifiable and it says which environmental factor should be considered to actually see an effect.

"In industrial areas, the black form of the peppered moth has higher relative fitness (due to a better camouflage)" is a famous example of a falsifiable statement that illustrates the effect of natural selection.

Thus the traditional NP analysis requires less of the theoretical apparatus, since it does not need all those null determiners, the existence of which is non-falsifiable. Other things being equal, less is better according to Occam's Razor.

There are also "theorems" in science, particularly physics, and in engineering, but they often have statements and proofs in which physical assumptions and intuition play an important role; the physical axioms on which such "theorems" are based are themselves falsifiable.

One can also present the Omphalos hypothesis as an auxiliary hypothesis that is introduced into the accepted theory. In this view, the new theory remains falsifiable, but its falsifiability does not increase, because no additional observations are predicted. In both views, the ad hoc hypothesis, seen by itself, is not falsifiable because there is no way to measure the claimed "actual" time of creation that is proposed by this hypothesis. This is discussed in details by Dienes in the case of a variation on the Omphalos hypothesis, which, in addition, specifies that God made the creation in this way to test our faith.

But, for Popper and others, there is no (falsifiable) law of Natural Selection in this, because it only applies to some rare traits. Instead, for Popper, the work of Fisher and others on Natural Selection is part of an important metaphysical research program.

Smolin also predicted that inflation, if true, must only be in its simplest form, governed by a single field and parameter. Both predictions have held up, and they demonstrate Smolin's main thesis: that the theory of cosmological natural selection is Popper falsifiable.

Startups need to learn at a huge speed before running out of resources. Proactive actions (experimentation, searching, etc.) enhance a founder's learning to start a company. To learn effectively, founders often formulate falsifiable hypotheses, build a minimum viable product (MVP), and conduct A/B testing.

Back to the original question: why should falsifiability be the criterion? It is not that falsification directly leads to the rejection of a theory. That would be a rule of the bucket view of science. It is not that we must always look for theories that are more falsifiable.

Some adherents of young-Earth creationism make an argument (called the Omphalos hypothesis after the Greek word for navel) that the world was created with the appearance of age; e.g., the sudden appearance of a mature chicken capable of laying eggs. This ad hoc hypothesis introduced into young-Earth creationism makes it non-falsifiable because it says that the time of creation (of a species) measured by the accepted technology is illusory and no accepted technology is proposed to measure the claimed "actual" time of creation. Popper says that it's fine to modify a theory by the introduction of an auxiliary hypothesis, but the new theory must at the least remain falsifiable, which is not the case here.

Grover Maxwell discussed statements such as "All men are mortal". This is not falsifiable, because it does not matter how old a man is, maybe it will die next year. Maxwell said that this statement is nevertheless useful, because it is often corroborated. He coined the term "corroboration without demarcation".

He even sent a copy to each member of Congress. The theory has been influential in the fields of generational studies, marketing, and business management literature. However, it has also been criticized by several historians and some political scientists and journalists, as being overly-deterministic, non-falsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence.

Realist and constructivist theories are normally taken to be contraries. However, Karl PopperPopper, Karl Raimund (1946) Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XX. argued that a number statement such as can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true. In the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable.

A theoretical definition of a term can change, over time, based on the methods in the field that created it. Without a falsifiable operational definition, conceptual definitions assume both knowledge and acceptance of the theories that it depends on. A hypothetical construct may serve as a theoretical definition, as can a stipulative definition.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Adolf Grünbaum argues in Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis (1993) that psychoanalytic based theories are falsifiable, but that the causal claims of psychoanalysis are unsupported by the available clinical evidence.Grünbaum, Adolf. 1993. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.

In 1992 Smolin also predicted that inflation, if true, must only be in its simplest form, governed by a single field and parameter. Both predictions have held up, and they demonstrate Smolin's main thesis: that the theory of cosmological natural selection is Popper falsifiable. This idea was further studied by Nikodem Poplawski.

This "meta"-doomsday argument application of the concept to the doomsday argument itself, requires some assumptions that are not universally accepted: # The hypothesis that the same reasoning can be applied to the lifetime of mathematical theories as can be applied to the survival time of a species. One difference is that evidence exists for the average "lifetime" of a scientific (falsifiable) prediction; there are libraries full of refuted, unrefuted, and forgotten papers published on mathematics. # The truth-value of the doomsday argument and the survival of the human race are un-correlated in the simple calculation above. # The concept that the doomsday argument is susceptible to refutation; if the doomsday argument is not falsifiable then there is no mechanism for refuting it, even if it is false.

The philosopher Karl Popper held that any scientific proposition must be falsifiable, in other words it must at least be possible to imagine some reproducible experiment or observation whose outcome would disprove the hypothesis. Initially he thought that Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection (often summarized as "the survival of the fittest""This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest." -- ) was untestable in this sense, and therefore "almost tautological." Popper later changed his view, concluding that the theory of natural selection is falsifiable and that Darwin's own example of the peacock's tail had disproved one extreme variation of it, that all evolution is driven by natural selection.

He gives examples in stock market newsletter scams, choosing a spouse, coincidence and the law, coin toss and the Hot-hand fallacy in sports. # Pseudoscience. Here the author takes on how non-falsifiable statements play in with pseudoscience. For example Whatever God wills happens can not be proven false so is not part of science.

One possible candidate is the gravitational interaction as in the models of Diósi and Penrose. The main difference of objective-collapse models compared to the other approaches is that they make falsifiable predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics. Experiments are already getting close to the parameter regime where these predictions can be tested.

'A General Theory of Behaviour' applies to all sub-areas, situations, species, ages, stages, genders, and cultures. The only proviso for the GTB is that the organism must have consciousness. The theory consists of 20 principles and 80 propositions, in total, 100 empirically falsifiable propositions. These 100 propositions make the GTB transparent and capable of falsification.

Postmodernity rejected the idea of the past as a reference point and curated objects from the past for the sole purpose of freeing form from function. In postmodernism, truth was ephemeral as the focus was to avoid non-falsifiable tenets. Postmodernity described a total collapse of Modernity and its faith in progress and improvement in empowering the individual.

Critics of the Barrow and Tipler SAP claim that it is neither testable nor falsifiable, and thus is not a scientific statement but rather a philosophical one. The same criticism has been leveled against the hypothesis of a multiverse, although some argueAre Parallel Universes Unscientific Nonsense? Insider Tips for Criticizing the Multiverse Tegmark, Max. February 4, 2014.

Popper often uses astrology as an example of a pseudo-science. He says that it is not falsifiable because both the theory itself and its predictions are too imprecise. Kuhn, as an historian of science, remarked that many predictions made by astrologers in the past were quite precise and they were very often falsified. He also said that astrologers themselves acknowledged these falsifications.

Milton Friedman (1953), Essays in Positive Economics, pp. 15, 22, 31. Proponents of such models, particularly those associated with the Chicago school of economics, do not claim that a model's assumptions are an accurate description of reality, only that they help formulate clear and falsifiable hypotheses. In this view, the only way to judge the success of a hypothesis is empirical tests.

Lakatos gives the example of the path of a planet. If the path contradicts Newton's law, we will not know if it is Newton's law that is false or the assumption that no other body influenced the path. Popper was aware that one can always find another auxiliary hypothesis, though he clearly distinguished falsifiable theories such as Newton theory and non-falsifiable theories on this respect. Lakatos says that Popper's solution to these criticisms requires that one relaxes the assumption that an observation can show a theory to be false: Methodological falsificationism replaces the contradicting observation in a falsification with a "contradicting observation" accepted by convention among scientists, a convention that implies three decisions: the theory underlying the observation is correct, no auxiliary hypotheses explain this observation and the written form of the observation matches with an actual observation.

In science, the term "theory" refers to "a well- substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment."National Academy of Sciences, 1999AAAS Evolution Resources Theories must also meet further requirements, such as the ability to make falsifiable predictions with consistent accuracy across a broad area of scientific inquiry, and production of strong evidence in favor of the theory from multiple independent sources (consilience). The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena. Theories are improved (or replaced by better theories) as more evidence is gathered, so that accuracy in prediction improves over time; this increased accuracy corresponds to an increase in scientific knowledge.

Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific—a label not in itself unfavorable. Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values.

This utility maximization process is thought to be mediated by the locus coeruleus system and this creativity framework describes how tonic and phasic locus coerulues activity work in conjunction to facilitate the exploiting and exploring of creative ideas. This framework not only explains previous empirical results but also makes novel and falsifiable predictions at different levels of analysis (ranging from neurobiological to cognitive and personality differences).

1255, 1258–1264) (ED Ark. 1982), brought in Arkansas, the judge, William Overton, gave a clear, specific definition of science as a basis for ruling that 'creation science' is religion and not science. His judgment defined the essential characteristics of science as being :#guided by natural law; :#explanatory by reference to natural law; :#empirically testable; :#tentative in conclusion, i.e. not necessarily the final word; :#falsifiable.

Carl Jung sought to invoke synchronicity, the claim that two events have some sort of acausal connection, to explain the lack of statistically significant results on astrology from a single study he conducted. However, synchronicity itself is considered neither testable nor falsifiable. The study was subsequently heavily criticised for its non-random sample and its use of statistics and also its lack of consistency with astrology.

It is of note that the theory of limiting similarity does not easily generate falsifiable predictions about natural phenomenon. However, many studies have tried to test the theory by making the highly suspect assumption that character displacement can be used as a close proxy for niche incongruence.Abrams P. 1983. The Theory of Limiting Similarity. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 14: 359–376.

Grünbaum argues that the psychoanalytic theory of paranoia is in principle falsifiable, since Freud's view that repressed homosexuality is a necessary cause of paranoia entails the testable claim that a decline in social sanctions against homosexuality should result in a decline in paranoia. Grünbaum also discusses the work of the philosopher Clark Glymour. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Grünbaum criticizes Habermas's hermeneutic interpretation of psychoanalysis.

Hence what we normally conceive as the fundamental constants of the universe are ultimately the result of the anthropic principle rather than dictated by theory. This has led to criticism of string theory, arguing that it cannot make useful (i.e., original, falsifiable, and verifiable) predictions and regarding it as a pseudoscience. Others disagree, and string theory remains an active topic of investigation in theoretical physics.

Nativism is sometimes perceived as being too vague to be falsifiable, as there is no fixed definition of when an ability is supposed to be judged "innate". (As Jeffrey Elman and colleagues pointed out in Rethinking Innateness, it is unclear exactly how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes.) Further, modern nativist theory makes little in the way of specific testable (and falsifiable) predictions, and has been compared by some empiricists to a pseudoscience or nefarious brand of "psychological creationism". As influential psychologist Henry L. Roediger III remarked that "Chomsky was and is a rationalist; he had no uses for experimental analyses or data of any sort that pertained to language, and even experimental psycholinguistics was and is of little interest to him". Some researchers argue that the premises of linguistic nativism were motivated by outdated considerations and need reconsidering.

Although in 1978 Popper wrote that his earlier objection had been specifically to the theory of natural selection, in lectures and articles from 1949 to 1974 he had stated that "Darwinism" or "Darwin's theory of evolution" was a "metaphysical research programme" because it was not falsifiable. In fact he continued to express dissatisfaction with contemporary statements of the theory of evolution which focused on population genetics, the study of the relative frequencies of alleles (different forms of the same gene). Unfortunately some of the adjustments he proposed resembled Lamarckianism or saltationism, evolutionary theories that were and still are considered obsolete, and evolutionary biologists therefore disregarded his criticisms. In 1981 Popper complained that he had been misinterpreted as saying that "historical sciences" such as paleontology or the history of evolution of life on Earth were not genuine sciences, when in fact he believed they could make falsifiable predictions.

Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining both quantitative and qualitative research). The term "social research" has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods.

To put it strongly — any scholar in the field > of cultural studies and its related disciplines, will have to respond to his > work.... It traces the history of the two encounters of European culture > with other cultures and empirically shows that the existence of religion was > assumed both these times. It argues that the ‘universality of religion' is a > falsifiable assumption and that religion is not a cultural universal.

There has been some decrease in interest in the demarcation problem in recent years. Part of the problem is that many suspect that it is an intractable problem, since so many previous attempts have come up short. For example, many obvious examples of pseudoscience have been shown to be falsifiable, or verifiable, or revisable. Therefore, many of the previously proposed demarcation criteria have not been judged as particularly reliable.

Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity. Where it has made falsifiable predictions under controlled conditions, they have been falsified. One famous experiment included 28 astrologers who were asked to match over a hundred natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) questionnaire.My former student Shawn Carlson published in Nature magazine the definitive scientific test of Astrology.

Mayflies walk on four legs, as Aristotle stated. The text contains some claims that appear to be errors. Aristotle asserted that the females of any species have a smaller number of teeth than the males. This apparently readily falsifiable claim could have been a genuine observation, if as Robert Mayhew suggests women at that time had a poorer diet than men; but the claim is not true of other species either.

In 1989, Feyerabend presented an idea informed by Popper's critical rationalism whereby "investigation starts with a problem. The problem is the result of a conflict between an expectation and an observation, which, in its turn, is formed by the expectation." (Feyerabend, 1989; pp. 96). Scientific methodology then resolves problems by inventing theories that should be relevant and falsifiable, at least to a greater degree than any other alternative solution.

In response to Lakatos who suggested that Newton's theory was as hard to show falsifiable as Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Popper gave the example of an apple that moves from the ground up to a branch and then starts to dance from one branch to another. It is clearly impossible, yet a basic statement that is a valid potential falsifier for Newton's theory, because the position of the apple at different times can be measured.

Popper said that not all non- falsifiable statements are useless in science. Mathematical statements are good examples. Like all formal sciences, mathematics is not concerned with the validity of theories based on observations in the empirical world, but rather, mathematics is occupied with the theoretical, abstract study of such topics as quantity, structure, space and change. Methods of the mathematical sciences are, however, applied in constructing and testing scientific models dealing with observable reality.

Davies also argues that Phillipson's claims are not falsifiable: what "if the dominated... wanted to adopt English and continue to want to keep it? RP's unfalsifiable answer must be that they don't, they can't, they've been persuaded against their better interests."Davies (1996), p. 488 It has thus been argued that Phillipson's theory is patronizing in its implication that developing countries lack independent decision-making capacity (to adopt or not to adopt ELT).

Scientific theories are testable and make falsifiable predictions.Popper, Karl (1963), Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, UK. Reprinted in Theodore Schick (ed., 2000), Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, Calif. Thus, it is a mark of good science if a discipline has a growing list of superseded theories, and conversely, a lack of superseded theories can indicate problems in following the use of the scientific method.

Astrology consists of a number of belief systems that hold that there is a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events or descriptions of personality in the human world. Astrology has been rejected by the scientific community as having no explanatory power for describing the universe. Scientific testing has found no evidence to support the premises or purported effects outlined in astrological traditions. Where astrology has made falsifiable predictions, it has been falsified.

A theory that is by its own terms dogmatic, absolutist and never subject to revision is not a scientific theory. In summary, he held that a scientific theory to be taught in schools must have the following properties: # It is guided by natural law; # It has to be explained by reference to natural law; # It is testable against the empirical world; # Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; # It is falsifiable.

Unlike his linguistic methods for reconstructing past languages, they were unable to produce scientifically falsifiable results.Tom Shippey, 'A Revolution Reconsidered: Mythography and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century', in The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. by Tom Shippey, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 291/Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 14 (Tempe, AZ: Arizon Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 1-28 (pp.

Theories of history or politics that allegedly predict future events have a logical form that renders them neither falsifiable nor verifiable. They claim that for every historically significant event, there exists an historical or economic law that determines the way in which events proceeded. Failure to identify the law does not mean that it does not exist, yet an event that satisfies the law does not prove the general case. Evaluation of such claims is at best difficult.

Philosopher Karl Popper discussed the scientific standing of economics in the 1940s and 1950s. He argued that mathematical economics suffered from being tautological. In other words, insofar as economics became a mathematical theory, mathematical economics ceased to rely on empirical refutation but rather relied on mathematical proofs and disproof. According to Popper, falsifiable assumptions can be tested by experiment and observation while unfalsifiable assumptions can be explored mathematically for their consequences and for their consistency with other assumptions.

Solipsism is not a falsifiable hypothesis as described by Karl Popper: there does not seem to be an imaginable disproof. One critical test is nevertheless to consider the induction from experience that the externally observable world does not seem, at first approach, to be directly manipulable purely by mental energies alone. One can indirectly manipulate the world through the medium of the physical body, but it seems impossible to do so through pure thought (e.g. via psychokinesis).

His results have never been reproduced, and are generally regarded either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any scientific merit. Frank Tipler has argued that physics can explain immortality, although such arguments are not falsifiable and, in Karl Popper's views, they do not qualify as science. After 25 years of parapsychological research Susan Blackmore came to the conclusion that, according to her experiences, there is not enough empirical evidence for many of these cases.

"Philip Kitcher 1982 Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, pp. 45–48. Cambridge: The MIT Press He also says that scientific theories include statements that cannot be falsified, and that good theories must also be creative. He insists we view scientific theories as an "elaborate collection of statements", some of which are not falsifiable, while others—those he calls "auxiliary hypotheses", are. According to Kitcher, good scientific theories must have three features: # Unity: "A science should be unified….

Deutsch takes examples from Greek mythology. He describes how very specific, and even somewhat falsifiable theories were provided to explain how the god Demeter's sadness caused the seasons. Alternatively, Deutsch points out, one could have just as easily explained the seasons as resulting from the god's happiness, which would make it a poor explanation because it is so easy to arbitrarily change details. Without Deutsch's criterion, the 'Greek gods explanation' could have just kept adding justifications.

The Smolin–Susskind debate refers to the series of intense postings in 2004 between Lee Smolin and Susskind, concerning Smolin’s argument that the "anthropic principle cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science." It began on July 26, 2004, with Smolin's publication of "Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle." Smolin e-mailed Susskind asking for a comment. Having not had the chance to read the paper, Susskind requested a summarization of his arguments.

And that concept of value can be compared with rival concepts and the rival theories they make possible in order to establish which has greater explanatory or predictive capacity. Fourth, modern philosophy of science rejects Popper's falsification theory as an adequate portrayal of science. Scientific statements are not necessarily falsifiable statements but fallible statements (i.e., they could be wrong) that, in principle, can be tested against observables, even if we do not yet know technically how to do this.

She echoed a quantitative stance towards narrative research by explaining > I can't review someone I feel sorry or hopeless about...I'm forced to feel > sorry because of the way they present themselves as: dissed blacks, abused > women, or disenfranchised homosexuals - as performers, in short, who make > victimhood victim art Croce illustrates what Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis refer to as "illusory boundaries and borders between scholarship and criticism". These "borders" are seen to hide or take away from the idea that autoethnographic evaluation and criticism present another personal story about the experience of an experience. Or as Craig Gingrich-Philbrook wrote, "any evaluation of autoethnography...is simply another story from a highly situated, privileged, empowered subject about something he or she experienced". Prominent philosopher of science, Karl Popper, when claiming that falsifiability was a basic criteria of a scientific theory said: > A theory is falsifiable ... if there exists at least one non-empty class of > homotypic basic statements which are forbidden by it As autoethnography makes no claims that can be verified, it is no longer falsifiable.

The observation of a black swan falsifies the hypothesis "All swans are white". In the philosophy of science, falsifiability or refutability is the capacity for a statement, theory or hypothesis to be contradicted by evidence. For example, the statement "All swans are white" is falsifiable because one can observe that black swans exist. Falsifiability was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book Logik der Forschung (1934, revised and translated into English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery).

Practitioners use such methods to estimate the size, economic significance, and statistical significance ("signal strength") of the hypothesized relation(s) and to adjust for noise from other variables. By such means, a hypothesis may gain acceptance, although in a probabilistic, rather than certain, sense. Acceptance is dependent upon the falsifiable hypothesis surviving tests. Use of commonly accepted methods need not produce a final conclusion or even a consensus on a particular question, given different tests, data sets, and prior beliefs.

In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation. He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences", so that a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time. This has been summarized as a statement being falsifiable "if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe".

Cognitive Rhetoric offers a new way of looking at properties of literature from the perspective of cognitive science. It is interdisciplinary in character and committed to data and methods that produce falsifiable theory. Rhetoric also offers a store of stylistic devices observed for their effect on audiences, providing a rich index with distinguished examples available to researchers in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive science. For Mark Turner (a prominent figure in Cognitive Rhetoric), narrative imaging is the fundamental instrument of everyday thought.

Falsificationism's demarcation falsifiable grants a theory the status scientific—simply, empirically testable—not the status meaningful, a status that Popper did not aim to arbiter.Karl Popper, ch 4, subch "Science: Conjectures and refutations", in Andrew Bailey, ed, First Philosophy: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy, 2nd edn (Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 2011), pp 338–42. Popper found no scientific theory either verifiable or, as in Carnap's "liberalization of empiricism", confirmable,Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality (U Chicago P, 2003), p 57–59.

American Psychologist, 15–24. SES and health outcomes are general across time, place, disease, and are finely graded up the SES continuum. Gottfredson argues that general intelligence (g) is the fundamental cause for health inequality. The argument is that g is the fundamental cause of social class inequality in health, because it meets six criteria that every candidate for the cause must meet: stable distribution over time, is replicable, is a transportable form of influence, has a general effect on health, is measurable, and is falsifiable.

Popper's solutionPopper, Karl Raimund (1946) Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XX. was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true, in the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable. Concisely, the pure mathematics "2 + 2 = 4" is always true, but, when the formula is applied to real-world apples, it is open to falsification.

The hypothetico-deductive model or method is a proposed description of the scientific method. According to it, scientific inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis in a form that can be falsifiable, using a test on observable data where the outcome is not yet known. A test outcome that could have and does run contrary to predictions of the hypothesis is taken as a falsification of the hypothesis. A test outcome that could have, but does not run contrary to the hypothesis corroborates the theory.

According to Wallerstein himself, critique of the world-systems approach comes from four directions: the positivists, the orthodox Marxists, the state autonomists, and the culturalists. The positivists criticise the approach as too prone to generalization, lacking quantitative data and failing to put forth a falsifiable proposition. Orthodox Marxists find the world-systems approach deviating too far from orthodox Marxist principles, such as by not giving enough weight to the concept of social class. The state autonomists criticize the theory for blurring the boundaries between state and businesses.

Likewise, Katz's (1960) deductive findings did more to explain and define the general concepts of FAT than it did in guiding the methods of future research. In fact, the lack of earlier research on FAT has been linked to both studies’ failure to provide reproducible and falsifiable methods for future research on the theory (Harris & Toledo, 1997; Shavitt & Nelson, 2002). Despite this lack of methodology, both studies contributed to the basic concepts of FAT as it came of age in the 1980s and on.

Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity, and as such, is regarded as pseudoscience. There is no proposed mechanism of action by which the positions and motions of stars and planets could affect people and events on Earth that does not contradict well understood, basic aspects of biology and physics. Where astrology has made falsifiable predictions, it has been falsified. The most famous test was headed by Shawn Carlson and included a committee of scientists and a committee of astrologers.

Maxwell said that most scientific laws are metaphysical statements of this kind, which, Popper said, need to be made more precise before they can be indirectly corroborated. In his critique of the falsifiability criterion, Maxwell considered the requirement for decisions in the falsification of, both, the emission of neutrinos (see ) and the existence of the melting point. Another example, from the pepper moth example, is "In all areas, the white vs black trait of the pepper moth affects its fitness." This is also not falsifiable, because maybe the right environmental factor was not yet considered.

The source of this issue may be in terminology: the term theory is used differently here than in physics, chemistry, and other sciences. Specific instantiations of Optimality Theory may make falsifiable predictions, in the same way specific proposals within other linguistic frameworks can. What predictions are made, and whether they are testable, depends on the specifics of individual proposals (most commonly, this is a matter of the definitions of the constraints used in an analysis). Thus, Optimality Theory as a framework is best described as a scientific paradigm.

In September 1981, Nature published an editorial about A New Science of Life entitled "A book for burning?" Written by the journal's senior editor, John Maddox, the editorial commented: Maddox argued that Sheldrake's hypothesis was not testable or "falsifiable in Popper's sense," referring to the work of philosopher Karl Popper. He said Sheldrake's proposals for testing his hypothesis were "time-consuming, inconclusive in the sense that it will always be possible to account for another morphogenetic field and impractical." In the editorial, Maddox ultimately rejected the suggestion that the book should be burned.

Eschatological verification describes a process whereby a proposition can be verified after death. A proposition such as "there is an afterlife" is verifiable if true but not falsifiable if false (if it's false, the individual will not know it's false, because they have no state of being). The term is most commonly used in relation to God and the afterlife, although there may be other propositions - such as moral propositions - which may also be verified after death. John Hick has expressed the premise as an allegory of a quest to a Celestial City.

He questioned Rancour-Laferriere's view that castration anxiety has been a major force in hominid evolution. Nevertheless, he believed that Rancour- Laferriere's attempt to integrate psychoanalysis, semiotics, and evolutionary biology, "yielded an array of speculations that are among the most fascinating ones yet proffered about hominid sexuality." Though he believed that his speculations about the function of the female orgasm were potentially falsifiable, he added that in general he failed to describe the conditions under which his hypotheses could be falsified. Crawford predicted that critics of sociobiology would not like the book.

In Karl Popper's philosophy of science, belief in a supernatural God is outside the natural domain of scientific investigation because all scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable in the natural world. The non-overlapping magisteria view proposed by Stephen Jay Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is irrelevant to and beyond the domain of science. Scientists follow the scientific method, within which theories must be verifiable by physical experiment. The majority of prominent conceptions of God explicitly or effectively posit a being whose existence is not testable either by proof or disproof.

Popper used astrology and psychoanalysis as examples of pseudoscience and Einstein's theory of relativity as an example of science. He subdivided nonscience into philosophical, mathematical, mythological, religious and metaphysical formulations on one hand, and pseudoscientific formulations on the other. Another example which shows the distinct need for a claim to be falsifiable was stated in Carl Sagan's publication The Demon-Haunted World when he discusses an invisible dragon that he has in his garage. The point is made that there is no physical test to refute the claim of the presence of this dragon.

In its simplest form, the assumption of treatment unit additivity states that the observed response yij from experimental unit i when receiving treatment j can be written as the sum yij = yi + tj. The assumption of unit treatment additivity implies that every treatment has exactly the same additive effect on each experimental unit. Since any given experimental unit can only undergo one of the treatments, the assumption of unit treatment additivity is a hypothesis that is not directly falsifiable, according to Cox and Kempthorne. However, many consequences of treatment-unit additivity can be falsified.

"Precambrian rabbits" or "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian" are reported to have been among responses given by the biologist J.B.S. Haldane when asked what evidence could destroy his confidence in the theory of evolution and the field of study. The answers became popular imagery in debates about evolution and the scientific field of evolutionary biology in the 1990s. Many of Haldane's statements about his scientific research were popularized in his lifetime. Some accounts use this response to rebut claims that the theory of evolution is not falsifiable by any empirical evidence.

A diagram of the Michelson–Morley experiment Relativity is a falsifiable theory: It makes predictions that can be tested by experiment. In the case of special relativity, these include the principle of relativity, the constancy of the speed of light, and time dilation. The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous tests since Einstein published his paper in 1905, but three experiments conducted between 1881 and 1938 were critical to its validation. These are the Michelson–Morley experiment, the Kennedy–Thorndike experiment, and the Ives–Stilwell experiment.

Karl Popper argues that a preference for simple theories need not appeal to practical or aesthetic considerations. Our preference for simplicity may be justified by its falsifiability criterion: we prefer simpler theories to more complex ones "because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable". The idea here is that a simple theory applies to more cases than a more complex one, and is thus more easily falsifiable. This is again comparing a simple theory to a more complex theory where both explain the data equally well.

That would also be a rule of the bucket view of science. Popper's main methodological rule is that scientists must try to guess and corroborate (or equivalently falsify) bold and useful conjectures and take any falsification as a problem that can be used to start a critical discussion. In other words, the usefulness of falsifiability is that falsifiable conjectures say more, because they prohibit more and, in the case of their falsification, they lead to useful problems, which steer the creative process of science. For Popper, who knew most of section , this is exactly what we should expect from a scientific theory.

Rancour-Laferriere provides an interdisciplinary discussion of human sexuality, drawing on psychoanalysis, sociobiology, and semiotics. He aims to make claims that are falsifiable and thus scientific in the sense understood by the philosopher Karl Popper. He provides evaluations of the work of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and the biologist E. O. Wilson, and considers topics such as the female orgasm, homosexuality, and castration anxiety. He argues, in opposition to the anthropologist Donald Symons in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), that evidence suggests that the female orgasm is adaptive, rather than simply being a byproduct of selection for the male orgasm.

Because the observable universe is defined as that region of the Universe visible to terrestrial observers, Earth is, because of the constancy of the speed of light, the center of Earth's observable universe. Reference can be made to the Earth's position with respect to specific structures, which exist at various scales. It is still undetermined whether the Universe is infinite. There have been numerous hypotheses that the known universe may be only one such example within a higher multiverse; however, no direct evidence of any sort of multiverse has been observed, and some have argued that the hypothesis is not falsifiable.

An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. Positive economics concerns what is. To illustrate, an example of a positive economic statement is as follows: "The unemployment rate in France is higher than that in the United States." Another is: “An increase in government spending would lower the unemployment rate.” Either of these is potentially falsifiable. In contrast, a normative statement is, for example, “Government spending should be increased.” A standard theoretical statement of positive economics as operationally meaningful theorems is in Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947). Positive economics as such avoids economic value judgements.

In certain cases, the less-accurate unmodified scientific theory can still be treated as a theory if it is useful (due to its sheer simplicity) as an approximation under specific conditions. A case in point is Newton's laws of motion, which can serve as an approximation to special relativity at velocities that are small relative to the speed of light. Scientific theories are testable and make falsifiable predictions. They describe the causes of a particular natural phenomenon and are used to explain and predict aspects of the physical universe or specific areas of inquiry (for example, electricity, chemistry, and astronomy).

This position has also been termed theological noncognitivism. A similar view can be seen in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he famously wrote that any work which did not include either (1) abstract reasoning on quantity or number or (2) reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence was "nothing but sophistry and illusion". In a similar vein, Antony Flew, questioned the validity of religious statements because they do not seem to be falsifiable, that is, religious claims do not seem to allow any counter evidence to count against them and thus they seem to be lacking in content.Davies 1993, p.

The most powerful argument against epiphenomenalism is that it is self-contradictory: if we have knowledge about epiphenomenalism, then our brains know about the existence of the mind, but if epiphenomenalism were correct, then our brains should not have any knowledge about the mind, because the mind does not affect anything physical. However, some philosophers do not accept this as a rigorous refutation. For example, Victor Argonov states that epiphenomenalism is a questionable, but experimentally falsifiable theory. He argues that the personal mind is not the only source of knowledge about the existence of mind in the world.

Theorems in mathematics and theories in science are fundamentally different in their epistemology. A scientific theory cannot be proved; its key attribute is that it is falsifiable, that is, it makes predictions about the natural world that are testable by experiments. Any disagreement between prediction and experiment demonstrates the incorrectness of the scientific theory, or at least limits its accuracy or domain of validity. Mathematical theorems, on the other hand, are purely abstract formal statements: the proof of a theorem cannot involve experiments or other empirical evidence in the same way such evidence is used to support scientific theories.

The debate with Flew, a major proponent of atheism famous for his argument that theism is not falsifiable, was held at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, Texas, USA from September 20–23, 1976. This was an exceptionally well attended debate, and Flew describes it as the best attended of his many debates with theists on the existence of God, with audiences each night ranging from 5,000-7,000 people. The Warren-Matson Debate took place in Tampa, Florida, USA from September 11–14, 1978. Matson, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley was, like Flew, a long-time proponent of atheism.

In the United States, the creation of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy responded to the need policy approaches wherein not all technologies were treated as identical based on their social or economic variables. Technology policy is distinct from science studies but both have been influenced by Thomas Samuel Kuhn. Research in the technology policy domain recognizes the importance of, amongst others, Vannevar Bush, Moses Abramovitz, William J. Abernathy and James M. Utterback. Technology policy approaches science as the pursuit of verifiable or falsifiable hypotheses, while science studies has a post-modern view whereby science is not thought to get at an objective reality.

Limiting similarity (informally "limsim") is a concept in theoretical ecology and community ecology that proposes the existence of a maximum level of niche overlap between two given species that will allow continued coexistence. This concept is a corollary of the competitive exclusion principle, which states that, controlling for all else, two species competing for exactly the same resources cannot stably coexist. It assumes normally-distributed resource utilization curves ordered linearly along a resource axis, and as such, it is often considered to be an oversimplified model of species interactions. Moreover, it has theoretical weakness, and it is poor at generating real-world predictions or falsifiable hypotheses.

However, he rejected Grünbaum's view that if the theory of repression can be invalidated, this would discredit psychoanalytic theory in general. Kline also accused Grünbaum of misunderstanding his arguments for the existence of repression, ignoring relevant evidence, and citing weak evidence. Notturno and McHugh, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, endorsed Grünbaum's view that the clinical evidence used as a basis for psychoanalysis is weak and that validation of Freud's claims must be based on extraclinical studies. However, they rejected his view that psychoanalysis is falsifiable, criticized his discussion of the psychoanalytic theory of paranoia, and disputed his position that Freud was open to the possibility of his theories being falsified.

If a player anticipates that the opponent is prone to making such errors, it will be in that player's interest to cooperate until just before the opponent recognizes the error. While these alternative explanations are descriptive and plausible, they are also non-predictive and non-falsifiable, which limits their usefulness as behavioral models. They are also speculative: given an observation that deviates from a prediction, economists are unable to distinguish between errors, social preferences, intentional strategies, or other causes. Cognitive Hierarchy Theory explains the observed pattern of opportunistic cooperation found in many games, without being susceptible to speculation about players' traits, such as intelligence or motivations.

From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms: A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Gene-Darwinism and Universal Darwinism. Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Skeptic Society founder and Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer addresses the tautology problem in his 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, in which he points out that although tautologies are sometimes the beginning of science, they are never the end, and that scientific principles like natural selection are testable and falsifiable by virtue of their predictive power. Shermer points out, as an example, that population genetics accurately demonstrate when natural selection will and will not effect change on a population.

Archaeologists distinguish their research from pseudoarchaeology by pointing to differences in research methodology, including recursive methods, falsifiable theories, peer review, and a generally systematic approach to collecting data. Though there is overwhelming evidence of cultural connections informing folk traditions about the past, objective analysis of folk archaeology—in anthropological terms of their cultural contexts and the cultural needs they respond to—have been comparatively few. However, in this vein, Robert Silverberg located the Mormon's use of Mound Builder culture within a larger cultural nexus and the voyage of Madoc and "Welsh Indians" was set in its changing and evolving sociohistorical contexts by Gwyn Williams.

The simple view was first described by Gough and Tunmer in the feature article of the first 1986 issue of the journal Remedial and Special Education. Their aim was to set out a falsifiable theory that would settle the debate about the relationship between decoding skill and reading ability. They define decoding as the ability to read isolated words “quickly, accurately, and silently” and dependent fundamentally on the knowledge of the correspondence between letters and their sounds. In setting out the simple view, Gough and Tunmer were responding to an ongoing dispute among psychologists, researchers and educationalists about the contribution of decoding to reading comprehension.

As is true of all axioms of logic, the law of non- contradiction is alleged to be neither verifiable nor falsifiable, on the grounds that any proof or disproof must use the law itself prior to reaching the conclusion. In other words, in order to verify or falsify the laws of logic one must resort to logic as a weapon, an act which would essentially be self-defeating.S.M. Cohen, Aristotle on the Principle of Non-Contradiction "Aristotle's solution in the Posterior Analytics is to distinguish between episteme (scientific knowledge) and nous (intuitive intellect). First principles, such as PNC, are not objects of scientific knowledge - since they are not demonstrable - but are still known, since they are grasped by nous".

Economist Thomas Mayer has stated that Austrians advocate a rejection of the scientific method which involves the development of empirically falsifiable theories. Furthermore, economists have developed numerous experiments that elicit useful information about individual preferences. Although economist Leland Yeager is sympathetic to Austrian economics, he rejects many favorite views of the Misesian group of Austrians, in particular "the specifics of their business-cycle theory, ultra- subjectivism in value theory and particularly in interest-rate theory, their insistence on unidirectional causality rather than general interdependence, and their fondness for methodological brooding, pointless profundities, and verbal gymnastics". Economist Paul A. Samuelson wrote in 1964 that most economists believe that economic conclusions reached by pure logical deduction are limited and weak.

Martínez-Romero is not worried about falsifying the paranormal hypothesis. (An advantage of this and other cases of alleged thoughtographic appearances is that, as the paranormal interpretation is falsifiable, it is not a pseudo-scientific hypothesis.)The concept of the hypothetical "permanent paranormal object" is explained in chapter "What is to count as good evidence for the paranormal" in Argumosa himself, who used to be the main defender of this case in Spain, believes that Martínez-Romero discredited the phenomenon with his book.De Argumosa, quoted in (p.163) The most serious publication to date by a believer appears in the first chapter of the book The Seen and the Unseen by Andrew Carr MacKenzie.

It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols. The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion). As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available.

In the editorial, Texas said that Silver's predictions were, despite their reliance on data, not falsifiable and thus unscientific, and that they overstated the statistical impact of factors like endorsements based on subjective assumptions about historical elections. Texas wrote that readers of data journalism—such as voters, other journalists, and members of the political establishment—rely on quasi-scientific predictions and analysis when making political decisions, in ways that adversely shapes the real outcomes: In interviews, Biederman said that they do believe there is a place for data journalism, but that its prominent practitioners had relied on outdated theories of how elections work and failed to account for the unprecedented anger of voters in an ahistorical election.

Some critics, such as Jerry Coyne (professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago) and Eugenie Scott (a physical anthropologist and former executive director of the National Center for Science Education) have argued that the concept of irreducible complexity and, more generally, intelligent design is not falsifiable and, therefore, not scientific. Behe argues that the theory that irreducibly complex systems could not have evolved can be falsified by an experiment where such systems are evolved. For example, he posits taking bacteria with no flagellum and imposing a selective pressure for mobility. If, after a few thousand generations, the bacteria evolved the bacterial flagellum, then Behe believes that this would refute his theory.

An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung, arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, directly answered verificationism. Popper heeded the problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible,Popper then denies that science requires inductive inference or that it actually exists, although most philosophers believe it exists and that science requires it [Samir Okasha, The Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (NY: OUP, 2002), p. 23], and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction, whose inference form is denying the consequent, Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions.

The argument that a minimum wage decreases employment is based on a simple supply and demand model of the labor market. A number of economists (for example Pierangelo Garegnani, Robert L. Vienneau, and Arrigo Opocher & Ian Steedman), building on the work of Piero Sraffa, argue that that model, even given all its assumptions, is logically incoherent. Michael Anyadike-Danes and Wynne Godley argue, based on simulation results, that little of the empirical work done with the textbook model constitutes a potentially falsifiable theory, and consequently empirical evidence hardly exists for that model. Graham White argues, partially on the basis of Sraffianism, that the policy of increased labor market flexibility, including the reduction of minimum wages, does not have an "intellectually coherent" argument in economic theory.

Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics explored the role of controversy and disagreement in the progress of science. It argued that science progresses fastest if the scientific community encourages the widest possible disagreement among trained and accredited professionals prior to the formation of consensus brought about by experimental confirmation of predictions of falsifiable theories. He proposed that this meant the fostering of diverse competing research programs, and that premature formation of paradigms not forced by experimental facts can slow the progress of science. As a case study, The Trouble with Physics focused on the issue of the falsifiability of string theory due to the proposals that the anthropic principle be used to explain the properties of our universe in the context of the string landscape.

Historically, systematic ideology has been unable to produce a falsifiable and causal model for what it is that influences some people and not others to gravitate towards a particular ideology. Walsby's early version of the theory was clearly hierarchical (with those understanding the theory being the smallest group of all, metaphorically positioned at the apex of a pyramid, just above the SPGB) and it lent itself to criticism on the grounds that it was merely a particularly convoluted type of human nature argument. This was essentially the response outlined in the Socialist Standard’s April 1949 review of Walsby's book called The Domain of Sterilities. Twin studies have shown that genetics have a strong effect on both attitude formation, and receptivity to ideological affiliation.

Logic of Scientific Discovery, section 43 Popper held that seeking for theories with a high probability of being true was a false goal that is in conflict with the search for knowledge. Science should seek for theories that are most probably false on the one hand (which is the same as saying that they are highly falsifiable and so there are many ways that they could turn out to be wrong), but still all actual attempts to falsify them have failed so far (that they are highly corroborated). Wesley C. Salmon criticizes Popper on the grounds that predictions need to be made both for practical purposes and in order to test theories. That means Popperians need to make a selection from the number of unfalsified theories available to them, which is generally more than one.

Some astronomers have speculated that the objects eclipsing Tabby's Star could be parts of a megastructure made by an alien civilization, such as a Dyson swarm, a hypothetical structure that an advanced civilization might build around a star to intercept some of its light for their energy needs. According to Steinn Sigurðsson, the megastructure hypothesis is implausible and disfavored by Occam's razor and fails to sufficiently explain the dimming. He says that it remains a valid subject for scientific investigation, however, because it is a falsifiable hypothesis. Due to extensive media coverage on this matter, Tabby's Star has been compared by Kepler's Steve Howell to , another star with an odd light curve that was shown, after years of research, to be a part of a five-star system.

Some 21st century critical rationalists argue that claims of correcting for introspection illusions or other cognitive biases pose a threat of immunizing themselves to criticism by alleging that criticism of psychological theories that claim cognitive bias are "justifications" for cognitive bias, making it non-falsifiable by labelling of critics and also potentially totalitarian. These modern critical rationalists argue that defending a theory by claiming that it overcomes bias and alleging that critics are biased, can defend any pseudoscience from criticism; and that the claim that "criticism of A is a defense of B" is inherently incapable of being evidence-based, and that any actual "most humans" bias (if it existed) would be shared by most psychologists thus make psychological claims of biases a way of accusing unbiased criticism of being biased and marketing the biases as overcoming of bias.

Words like "fear" are replaced with words like "phobia", with its connotations of irrationality. Criticisms of the scientific validity of the RTS construct are that it is vague in important details; it is unclear what its boundary conditions are; it uses unclear terms that do not have a basis in psychological science; it fails to specify key quantitative relationships; it has not undergone subsequent scientific evaluation since the 1974 Burgess and Holstrom study; there are theoretical allegiance effects; it has not achieved a consensus in the field; it is not falsifiable; it ignores possible mediators; it is not culturally sensitive; and it is not suitable for being used to infer that rape has or has not occurred. PTSD has been described as a superior model since unlike RTS, empirical examination of the PTSD model has been extensive, both conceptually and empirically.

Both EUT and PT make the following falsifiable prediction: an individual cannot be so risk averse as to value a risky prospect less than the prospect’s worst possible outcome. On the contrary, several between-participant studies have found that people are willing to pay less, on average, for a binary lottery than for its worse outcome, a finding coined the uncertainty effect (UE). For example, people are willing to pay an average of $26 for a $50 gift certificate, but only $16 for a lottery that pays either a $50 or $100 gift certificate, with equal probability. UE, valuing a risky prospect below the value of its worse possible outcome, occurs as the result of a phenomenon known as direct risk aversion, a literal distaste for uncertainty, as uncertainty itself enters directly into people’s utility function.

Some religious or spiritual beliefs by their nature may not be falsifiable, and hence cannot be described as false or incorrect, no matter whether the person holding these beliefs was diagnosed as delusional or not. In other situations the delusion may turn out to be true belief. For example, in delusional jealousy, where a person believes that their partner is being unfaithful (and may even follow them into the bathroom believing them to be seeing their lover even during the briefest of partings), it may actually be true that the partner is having sexual relations with another person. In this case, the delusion does not cease to be a delusion because the content later turns out to be verified as true or the partner actually chose to engage in the behavior of which they were being accused.

Furthermore, inflation was found to be inevitably eternal, creating an infinity of different universes with typically different properties, so that the properties of the observable universe are a matter of chance. An alternative concept including a Big Bounce was conceived as a predictive and falsifiable possible solution to the horizon problem, and is under active investigation as of 2017. The phrase "Big Bounce" appeared in the scientific literature in 1987, when it was first used in the title of a pair of articles (in German) in Stern und Weltraum by Wolfgang Priester and Hans- Joachim Blome. It reappeared in 1988 in Iosif Rozental's Big Bang, Big Bounce, a revised English-language translation of a Russian-language book (by a different title), and in a 1991 article (in English) by Priester and Blome in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Some within CIA considered Golitsyn discredited even before Angleton's ousting, but the two did not appear to have lost their faith in one another. They sought the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr. (himself once in the CIA) in authoring New Lies for Old, which advanced the argument that the USSR planned to fake its collapse to lull its enemies into a false sense of victory, but Buckley refused. In his book Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA (Knopf, 1994), Mark Riebling stated that of 194 predictions made in New Lies For Old, 139 had been fulfilled by 1993, nine seemed 'clearly wrong', and the other 46 were 'not soon falsifiable'. Despite misgivings over his uncompromising and often obsessive approach to his profession, Angleton is highly regarded by a number of his peers in the intelligence business.

Popper disparages the pseudoscientific, which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving the theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory. Popper's scientific epistemology is falsificationism, which finds that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. Falsificationism finds science's aim as corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Explicitly denying the positivist view that all knowledge is scientific, Popper developed the general epistemology critical rationalism, which finds human knowledge to evolve by conjectures and refutations.

Though believing that it raised important issues, they questioned his argument that the psychoanalytic theory of paranoia is falsifiable. They also questioned his view that Popper was largely ignorant of Freud's writings and disputed his position that Freud was open to the possibility of his theories being falsified. Sachs described the book as a "provocative" work that had received respectful attention because of Grünbaum's knowledge of Freud's work and developments in psychoanalysis after Freud. Though he considered it an important criticism of psychoanalysis, he suggested that too much of it was devoted to criticizing Habermas and Ricœur, that Grünbaum misunderstood some of Freud's claims, falsely attributed the "Tally Argument" to Freud, overstated the extent to which Freud's theories depended on clinical data, provided a vague discussion of suggestion and ignored some of Freud's responses to the charge that his clinical data were unreliable, and unconvincingly criticized free association.

417 To clarify this point, it may be noticed that the special cases in question are also precisely those where J. B. Clark's old model of aggregate marginal productivity holds strictly true, leading to equality between the equilibrium levels of the real wage rate and labour's aggregate marginal product, a hypothesis regarded as disproved by all sides during the Cambridge capital controversy. One would thus have a "pure" state of capitalist society where Marx's exploitation theory and its main supposed confutation were both true. Like Clark's contention about the "fairness" of marginal-productivity wages, so Marx's basic argument--from the "substance" of value to the concept of exploitation--is claimed to be a set of non-analytical and non-empirical propositions. That is why, being non-falsifiable, both theories may be found to apply to the same formal and/or empirical object, though they are supposed to negate each other.

Critics have also suggested that Gould did not understand the purpose of factor analysis, and that he was ignorant of relevant methodological advances in the field. While different factor solutions may be mathematically equivalent in their ability to account for intercorrelations among tests, solutions that yield a g factor are psychologically preferable for several reasons extrinsic to factor analysis, including the phenomenon of the positive manifold, the fact that the same g can emerge from quite different test batteries, the widespread practical validity of g, and the linkage of g to many biological variables.Korb 1994 John Horn and John McArdle have argued that the modern g theory, as espoused by, for example, Arthur Jensen, is unfalsifiable, because the existence of a common factor like g follows tautologically from positive correlations among tests. They contrasted the modern hierarchical theory of g with Spearman's original two-factor theory which was readily falsifiable (and indeed was falsified).

Ross believes in progressive creationism, a view which posits that while the earth is billions of years old, life did not appear by natural forces alone but that a supernatural agent formed different lifeforms in incremental (progressive) stages, and day-age creationism which is an effort to reconcile a literal Genesis account of Creation with modern scientific theories on the age of the Universe, the Earth, life, and humans. He rejects the young Earth creationist (YEC) position that the earth is younger than 10,000 years, or that the creation "days" of Genesis 1 represent literal 24-hour periods. Ross instead asserts that these days (translated from the Hebrew word yom) are historic, distinct, and sequential, but not 24 hours in length nor equal in length. Ross and the RTB team agree with the scientific community that the vast majority of YEC arguments are pseudoscience and that any version of intelligent design is inadequate if it doesn't provide a testable hypothesis which can make verifiable and falsifiable predictions, and if not, it should not be taught in the classroom as science.

Positive Results: # Every model that satisfies Linear Stochastic Transitivity must also satisfy Strong Stochastic Transitivity, which in turn must satisfy Weak Stochastic Transitivity. This is represented as: LST \implies SST\impliesWST ; # Since the Bradeley-Terry models and the are LST models, they also satisfy SST and WST; # Due to the convenience of , a few authors have identified axiomatic of linear stochastic transitivity (and other models), most notably Gérard Debreu showed that : + \implies LST (see also Debreu Theorems); # Two LST models given by invertible comparison functions F(x) and G(x) are if and only if F(x) = G(\kappa x)for some \kappa \geq 0. Negative Results: # Stochastic transitivity models are empirically , however, they may be falsifiable; # between LST comparison functions F(x) and G(x) can be impossible even if an infinite amount of data is provided over a finite number of ; # The for WST, SST and LST models are in general NP-Hard, however, near optimal polynomially computable estimation procedures are known for SST and LST models.

Mary Hesse, "Bayesian methods and the initial probabilities of theories", pp 50–105, in Maxwell & Anderson, eds (U Minnesota P, 1975), p 100: "There are two major contending concepts for the task of explicating the simplicity of hypotheses, which may be described respectively as the concepts of content and economy. First, the theory is usually required to have high power or content; to be at once general and specific, and to make precise and detailed claims about the state of the world; that is, in Popper's terminology, to be highly falsifiable. This, as Popper maintains against all probabilistic theories of induction, has the consequence that good theories should be in general improbable, since the more claims a theory makes on the world, other things being equal, the less likely it is to be true. On the other hand, as would be insisted by inductivists, a good theory is one that is more likely than its rivals to be true, and in particular it is frequently assumed that simple theories are preferable because they require fewer premises and fewer concepts, and hence would appear to make fewer claims than more complex rivals about the state of the world, and hence be more probable".