Concept · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
Falsification
The practice of stating, in advance, what evidence would count against a belief.
- Territories
- Knowing
Source
Falsification, in the Popperian sense, is the criterion that a scientific claim must in principle be capable of being shown false by some possible observation.
Interpretation
This project extends the idea informally to everyday beliefs: not a formal scientific method, but a habit of asking what would have to be true for a given belief to be wrong.
Caution
Borrowing "falsification" outside its original philosophy-of-science context is a loose analogy, not a rigorous application of Popper's criterion, and will be treated as such.
Connected ideas
extends
- VerificationConcept
Falsification extends verification by requiring the check to be specified before the fact, not only performed after it.
is questioned by
related to
- Falsifiability demarcates scienceClaim
This is the concept's canonical statement.
Continue exploring
- ConceptVerificationThe act of checking a claim or output against something independent of the process that produced it.
- QuestionWhat would make me wrong?A question about whether a belief is stated in a form that could be falsified.
- ClaimFalsifiability demarcates sciencePopper's criterion: a theory is empirical only if some possible observation would contradict it.