|
Falsifiability or refutability of a statement, hypothesis, or theory is an inherent possibility to prove it to be false. A statement is called falsifiable if it is possible to conceive an observation or an argument which proves the statement in question to be false. In this sense, ''falsify'' is synonymous with ''nullify'', meaning not "to commit fraud" but "show to be false". For example, by the problem of induction, no number of confirming observations can verify a universal generalization, such as ''All swans are white'', yet it is logically possible to falsify it by observing a single black swan. Thus, the term ''falsifiability'' is sometimes synonymous to ''testability''. Some statements, such as ''It will be raining here in one million years'', are falsifiable in principle, but not in practice. The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes ''falsifiability'' the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. ==Overview== The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to prove hypotheses like "All swans are white" or to induce them from observational data. Popper argued that this would require the inference of a general rule from a number of individual cases, which is inadmissible in deductive logic.〔LScD p. 4〕 However, if one finds one single swan that is not white, deductive logic admits the conclusion that the statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of proving them. For a statement to be questioned using observation, it needs to be at least theoretically possible that it can come in conflict with observation. A key observation of falsificiationism is thus that a criterion of demarcation is needed to distinguish those statements that can come in conflict with observation and those that cannot (Chorlton, 2012). Popper chose falsifiability as the name of this criterion. Popper stressed that unfalsifiable statements are important in science.〔''LScD'', p. 16〕 Contrary to intuition, unfalsifiable statements can be embedded in — and deductively entailed by — falsifiable theories. For example, while "all men are mortal" is unfalsifiable, it is a logical consequence of the falsifiable theory that "every man dies before he reaches the age of 150 years".〔Keuth: ''The philosophy of Karl Popper'', p. 45〕 Similarly, the ancient metaphysical and unfalsifiable idea of the existence of atoms has led to corresponding falsifiable modern theories. Popper invented the notion of metaphysical research programs to name such unfalsifiable ideas.〔Quantum theory and the schism in physics, introductory comments〕 In contrast to Positivism, which held that statements are meaningless if they cannot be verified or falsified, Popper claimed that falsifiability is merely a special case of the more general notion of criticizability, even though he admitted that empirical refutation is one of the most effective methods by which theories can be criticized. Criticizability, in contrast to falsifiability, and thus rationality, may be comprehensive (i.e., have no logical limits), though this claim is controversial even among proponents of Popper's philosophy and critical rationalism. ==Naive falsification== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「falsifiability」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|