The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Popper, K. R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Logik der Forschung.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1959

Link

https://archive.org/details/logicofscientifi0000popp_s7y7

Cited from

mathematics, philosophy, philosophy_logic, psychology_cognitive_science

Cited by

12 citations across 12 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Absence as Information
  • The negative-finding logic of clinical reasoning — a hypothesis predicts X, X was not seen, the hypothesis is constrained — is the same logical engine as Popperian falsification, so a clinician and a methodologist are running one move in two registers.

    This sourceStates the falsificationist logic that a hypothesis predicting an observable is constrained when that observable fails to appear.

• Contraposition
  • modulo evidence-integrity assumptions, and reconciliation procedures are built on the contrapositive of expected traces. Falsifiability in science. "If hypothesis H, then observation O must hold" together with "O does not hold" yields "not H,"

    This sourceEstablishes falsifiability and the modus-tollens core of scientific testing: if H then O; not-O; therefore not-H.

• Epistemic Mode Of A Proposition
  • In empirical science, the modes are hypothesis (must be tested, never merely relied on), law or established theory (asserted, but provisionally and open to revision), datum (taken as given but carrying measurement error), and auxiliary assumption (relied on while flagged), and the central scientific operations — confirmation, falsification, replication — are mode transitions that move a proposition from hypothesis toward established fact or back to refuted.

    This sourceTreats scientific laws as provisional conjectures held open to falsification and only ever corroborated, not proved — supporting the hypothesis/law modes of science and confirmation/falsification as mode transitions (hypothesis → corroborated/refuted).

• Expectation Violation
  • Only the contradictions carry information about where the model stops being right.

    This sourceEstablishes the asymmetry by which confirming instances add nothing while a contradicting instance bounds where a model stops holding.

• Falsifiability
  • Falsifiability is the structural asymmetry whereby a universal or general claim can be conclusively refuted by a single contrary instance but can never be conclusively confirmed by any finite number of supporting instances, a relation Karl Popper (1934) placed at the center of the logic of scientific discovery.
• Inductive Reasoning
  • Positive instances confirming a hypothesis do not deductively establish it (confirming instances are always compatible with exceptions), yet one falsifying instance can definitively refute a universal hypothesis — an asymmetry that Popper

    This sourceHutchinson. Popper Logic of Scientific Discovery falsification principle.

• Unfalsifiability
  • Unfalsifiability is a relation between a claim and the observations that could bear on it: the claim is offered as answerable to evidence, yet no admissible result carries a stable claim-defeating status, so nothing that could be seen would compel rejection.

    This sourceEstablishes falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation and measures a theory's empirical content by its class of potential falsifiers, so a claim admitting no potential falsifier has no evidential exposure.

• Verifier-Prover Asymmetry
  • In scientific discovery, producing a theory that fits a body of data is slow while checking a stated theory's predictions is comparatively fast, so graduate students check in days what took years to find.

Domain-specific

• Newton's Flaming Laser Sword
  • Falsifiability asks whether some possible evidence could refute an empirical claim and, in Popper's account, helps demarcate empirical science.

    This sourceHutchinson. English edition of the 1934 account of falsifiability, empirical content, and demarcation.

Mechanisms

• Counterexample Admissibility Test
  • It embodies the discipline behind falsifiability — a universal claim must genuinely expose itself to membership-qualified counterexamples

    This sourceExplains that universal empirical statements are falsifiable through conflicting singular or basic statements.

• Falsification Check
  • The anchoring idea is Popper's falsifiability

    This sourceMakes exposure to possible empirical refutation—not accumulation of favorable instances—the criterion for an empirical scientific claim.

• Universal Counterexample Test
  • Its strength is efficiency born of asymmetry: refuting a universal takes one case, so a focused hunt for a counterexample is far cheaper than any attempt to confirm "all," and it is the engine behind treating a universal as a bold, falsifiable conjecture rather than an accumulation of agreeable examples.

    This sourceExplains that one counter-instance can falsify a universal statement while finite confirming instances cannot verify it.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 6 other ways.

• https://archive.org/details/logicofscientifi0000popp ×2
• https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Logic_of_Scientific_Discovery.html?id=KZvXAAAAMAAJ ×1
• https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb331409724 ×1
• https://search.worldcat.org/title/1036569074 ×1
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Logic_of_Scientific_Discovery/Yq6xeupNStMC ×1
• https://www.routledge.com/The-Logic-of-Scientific-Discovery/Popper/p/book/9780415278447 ×1

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