Psychoanalysis has long been accused of lacking scientific precision, ducking the ultimate test of
falsifiability and taking refuge instead in untestable speculations.
The philosopher Karl Popper's principle of '
falsifiability' in scientific enquiry bears relevance here.
The fight between history based on evidence and historical revisionism is analogous to that between sciences and pseudosciences: the ignorance that wears the white-lab coat of an experimental scientist and masquerades in the public realm as an ambassador of science while evading Popper's
falsifiability and appealing to the public through emotional anecdotes rather than evidence-based reproducible claims.
falsifiability of the truth and the intellectual efforts shown, reveal the absence of truth, its hidden nature.
Both the confirmationist criterion advocated by logical positivists and the
falsifiability one proposed by Karl R.
The author points out that these have taken the form of attempts to define science in terms of Popperian
falsifiability or methodological naturalism.
Indeed, according to Popper's (2002)
falsifiability criterion, any claim should be structurally falsifiable to have potential scientific value; as such, a given fact of agreed-upon scientific value may not hold true in future observations, and theories based on it thus collapse.
The most notable example involved her confusion of ground level ozone with chlorofluorocarbons and smog, although it is also evident in her shallow account of scientific rationality based on an overly simplistic account of Popperian
falsifiability and her sloppy use of ambiguous examples when summarizing Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Popper's theory of
falsifiability allows us to theorise that (self) assessment of individuals is reliable.
And Karl Popper, were he alive today, might be interested in applying the
falsifiability criterion to wild speculations such as Hansen's and Folger's.
A related question is whether social scientists need to rethink what counts as evidence or perhaps reject the scientific notions of
falsifiability and replication as too burdensome and inconvenient.
This approach requires us to revisit Piaget's constructivism theory, Karl Popper theory with its
falsifiability criterion.