Note on falsification

Popper's falsification

Falsification is the test of scientific knowledge that Karl Popper laid down against the logical positivists, for whom a claim was meaningful and true only if experiment could verify it. In place of verification Popper asked whether a claim is open to refutation, and he argued that all knowledge is conjectural and tentative and stays far from final truth. The point matters for political theory in three ways. First, it set a post-positivist mood within the philosophy of science and so loosened the grip of strict verificationism on the empirical approach, at a time when the behavioural revolution had made that approach dominant in the 1950s. Second, it separates hypotheses that could be tested against evidence (for example, a claim that proportional representation produces more parties than a plurality system) from doctrines framed so loosely that no event could count against them. Third, it is itself limited. Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Mary Hesse went further in criticising the positivist picture of science, and Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions showed that all knowing depends on understanding and interpretation shared among inquirers, so no test can be applied mechanically, least of all in a field in which values and meanings are part of the facts.

Place in the empirical approach

The behavioural form of the empirical approach rested on experiment and the verification principle, and it pressed for value-free, quantitative research. Popper's criterion revised that claim: a scientific theory is one that stays open to refutation, and no body of political knowledge can claim to be final or certain. For a student of politics it is a reminder to state hypotheses precisely, to look for evidence that would disprove them, and to avoid theories so loose that no event could contradict them.