How Scientific Knowledge Works
Popper's falsifiability, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and how science actually produces knowledge — messier than the textbook version but more reliable than any alternative.
Popper: Science as Falsification
Karl Popper argued that what makes science unique is not that it proves things but that it subjects claims to tests that could prove them wrong. A scientific theory is one that makes predictions that could, in principle, be shown to be false. 'All swans are white' is scientific because finding one black swan would refute it. 'Everything happens for a reason' is not scientific because no possible observation could refute it.
This is why scientific knowledge is more reliable than other forms: it has survived systematic attempts to disprove it. The theory of evolution has been tested millions of times across genetics, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and molecular biology. Each test was an opportunity for the theory to fail. That it has not failed is powerful evidence — stronger than any amount of confirmation because it has withstood attempts at refutation.