falsificationism

In philosophy of science, the belief that a scientific theory must be under constant scrutiny and that its merit lies only in how well it stands up to rigorous testing. It was first expounded by philosopher Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).

Such thinking also implies that a theory can be held to be scientific only if it makes predictions that are clearly testable. Critics of this belief acknowledge the strict logic of this process, but doubt whether the whole of scientific method can be subsumed into so narrow a programme. Philosophers and historians such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have attempted to use the history of science to show that scientific progress has resulted from a more complicated methodology than Popper suggests.