The test that a theory is scientific, according to the influential views of Karl Popper. Especially in Conjectures and Refutations (1963), Popper argued that science can never prove things to be true, but it can prove them to be false. It can never prove things to be true by what has been known since Hume as the ‘problem of induction’. ‘All swans are white’ is either part of the definition of the word ‘swan’, or a generalization about swans based on observations of all known examples. When settlers first saw black swans in Western Australia, they could have denied that what they saw were swans. As Hobbes said, ‘True and false are attributes of speech, not of things’. However, as a purely linguistic convention, it has been agreed that black swans are swans. Therefore ‘All swans are white’ is an example of a falsifiable, and false, scientific generalization. Thus a Popperian scientist must try to formulate a generalization which the scientist believes to be true but formulates in a way that is open to falsification.
The Popperian method is dominant but not unchallenged in empirical politics. All empirical work that uses statistical methods is explicitly or implicitly falsificationist in its approach. Other schools of thought argue that some aspects of political life may be unobservable, and the hypothesis that they exist unfalsifiable, but that they remain important topics of study. See also community power.
The Popperian programme has also been challenged on the grounds that scientists do not actually follow it, although they are trained to present their results as if they had. The most influential such critique has been Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn's critique does not undermine the falsificationist programme by as much as its literary adulators argue. Although historians of science cannot ignore it, it has had no impact on the way in which results continue to be presented and argued over.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
