Falsification and its Critics

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses hypothetico-deductive model for scientific explanation. The chapter discusses whether the hypotheses or theories which scientists use in scientific explanations can be falsified by experiment. This problem has received little attention compared with its twin problem, whether scientific hypotheses can be verified, or made highly probable, or highly confirmed, by experiment. This twin problem involves controversial and much-discussed issues about inductive logic, or probability logic, or the logic of confirmation. Compared with all this, the notion of falsification has seemed relatively unproblematic: a theory is proposed and a prediction deduced from it—if experiment shows that the prediction is false, then by trivial considerations of deductive logic the theory must be deemed false also.