#falsificationism

Thus, in order to test even a theory as straightforward as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, you need to make a lot of auxiliary hypotheses. The law of universal gravitation by itself doesn’t make any observable prediction. This isn’t just true of the law of universal gravitation, it’s true of any theory whatsoever. Just take any theory you’d like and think about how you’d go about to test it and you’ll soon realize that, in order to so, you need to make a lot of hypotheses that are not part of the theory itself. In general, a theory is never testable on its own, but only with the help of various auxiliary hypotheses or background assumptions. This means that a theory is never falsifiable simpliciter, but only relative to a set of background assumptions. Therefore, if we say that a theory is only scientific if it’s falsifiable, then it follows that no theory, not even a theory as successful as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, is scientific. Of course, this is absurd, so falsificationism is false.

If we had sat out to 'verify' our original statement that water boils at 100° Centigrade by accumulating confirming instances of it we should have found no difficulty whatever in accumulating any number of confirming instances we liked, billions and billions of them. But this would not have proved the truth of the statement, nor would it (and this realization may come as something of a shock) have increased the probability of its being true. Worst of all, our accumulation of confirming instances would itself never have given us reason to doubt, let alone replace, our original statement, and we should never have progressed beyond it.

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Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.