Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of falsification is indelibly marked by the methodological doctrine of falsificationism, associated above all with the work of Karl Popper. He first developed the elements of his position in the early 1920s as part of a project to establish a logically defensible criterion of scientificity, culminating in the publication of Logik der Forschung (later translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery ) in 1934. Falsifiability emerged as the basis of his solution to the so-called “problem of demarcation.” Much elaborated over subsequent years, his analysis of falsification became the foundation for the Popperian school in the philosophy and history of science and the central feature in their influential account of scientific growth. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, dissatisfaction with this analysis, not least among some of Popper's own followers, gave rise to variously radical revisions of the basic falsificationist position. Today, both the Popperian doctrine and the concept of falsification should be understood as component elements in a more diverse, though perhaps less rigorous, conceptualization of theory testing in science. Falsificationism was inextricably bound up with the problem of demarcation: the perceived need to distinguish science from a variety of other intellectual activities, not least what Popper called “pseudo-science” – a category within which he ... log in or subscribe to read full text