Falsifiability

Falsifiability is an essential concept in the [philosophy of science]?.

The nature of the scientific method that Karl Popper stressed is falsifiability; if an explanation can be falsified, then it is scientific and should be tested. If it can't (ie: it is unfalsifiable), then it is entirely outside the realm of science and totally irrelevant to it.

Some examples of things that are unfalsifiable are:

• The existence or non-existence of God. This is unfalsifiable because it is unable to be consistently tested. Those who believe in the existence of God note that God is able to make decisions, and thus would decide whether to cooperate with any test devised by humans. Those who don't believe in God's existence say that the failure of any particular test shows that God doesn't exist. Since any given test can prove and disprove God's existence at the same time, it is unfalsifiable.
• Many conspiracy theories.
• Solipsism?: the belief that the rest of the Universe is only a figment of one's own imagination.
• Tautology?: statements which are necessarily true without any knowledge of the world, such as "All green things are green." Proving mathematical theorems involves reducing them to tautologies given the axioms of the system or reducing the negative to a contradiction.
• Supernatural? creation of the world.

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