Pros And Cons Of Falsificationism

Imagine a world where the established scientific community deems theories on Unicorns, Flying Pigs and Leprechauns plausible because there is no evidence to contradict such farfetched ideas. Such is a world of falsificationism, one where science seeks not to arrive at the truth but rather to eliminate error. I will first briefly define falsificationism according to its champion, Karl Popper, before arguing that falsificationism cannot be considered a standard for science because science is too complex to be considered in binary terms. Falsification should only be regarded as one of many tools that aid us in shaping scientific theory, not as a way to explain the world around us.
Karl Popper contends that a hypothesis must be falsifiable so that in the
He proposes that science does not move forward linearly but rather as a result of revolutions in the topics of our study. He argues that scientific theories are based under structures that consist of multitudes of hypotheses. When many of these hypotheses are found wanting it leads to a state of crisis that eventually causes a paradigm shift as a newer, more attractive paradigm is agreed upon by the scientific community and the old one abandoned. (Chalmers, 108) Kuhn points to falsification as a part of developing a crisis and recognizes that successful paradigms will inevitably encounter anomalies. Falsification as a standard would throw out too many useful elements of the theories scientists create out of their observations. Like the Duheme Quine Thesis, Kuhn presents an argument that accounts for the multitude of hypotheses that go into scientific theories and the complexities of the sciences. This is a far more convincing mapping of how the sciences work because it reduces falsificationism to a factor of change in our understandings, not the