Falsification

A mental model developed at length in The Great Mental Models Volume 1 — General Thinking Concepts, drawn from Karl Popper: “A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences and is therefore in principle falsifiable by experience.” The book’s gloss is that “if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t really prove it right either,” and that “falsification is the opposite of verification” — you try to show a theory is incorrect, and “if you fail to do so, you actually strengthen it.” It pairs this with the SALY warning that “trend is not destiny,” illustrated by Bertrand Russell’s chicken, fed every day until the day its head gets chopped off: the daily feedings looked like a law but were only a trend, “not a predictor of the future state of affairs.” Falsification also threads into the book’s First Principles Thinking method — the Five Whys land on a first principle only when they bottom out in “a statement of falsifiable fact,” not “because I said so.”

Context: Falsification is Karl Popper’s account of how science advances — by attempting to refute conjectures rather than confirm them — and is the active counterpart to the Falsifiability criterion that defines which claims are scientific in the first place.

Where this appears

• The Great Mental Models Volume 1 — General Thinking Concepts — presents falsification (via Popper and Russell’s chicken) as a core thinking model and a test for first principles.