Criterion of falsifiability

Criterion of falsifiability, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false. The British philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902–94) proposed the criterion as a foundational method of the empirical sciences. He held that genuinely scientific theories are never finally confirmed, because disconfirming observations (observations that are inconsistent with the empirical...