unfalsifiable en · ADJ
Pronunciation
- (Mid-Atlantic, US) audio
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Germanic *un- Proto-West Germanic *un- Old English un- Middle English un- English un- English falsify Proto-Indo-European *-dʰlom Proto-Italic *-ðlom Proto-Italic *-ðlis Latin -bilis Latin -ābilis Old French -ablebor. Middle English -able English -able English falsifiable English unfalsifiable From un- + falsifiable.
Meanings
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(not-comparable, of a statement or argument) Not able to be proven false, but not necessarily true.
Conspiracy theories are designed to be unfalsifiable: every criticism can be dismissed as "whitewashing by the conspirers", and every concern can be summarized as "part of the greater conspiracy".
Unfalsifiability: The main problem with any particular conspiracy theory is not that it's wrong, but that it's inarguable; not that it's false, but that it is unfalsifiable.
2020, Maj Dr. Ebenezer Kwakye Agyemang (Rtd), DECODING 2019 NOVEL CORONAVIRUS: Outbreak: Conspiracies: Impact, page 153:Popper introduced the so-called ‘demarcation problem’ of identifying what distinguishes pseudoscience from science. Popper's suggestion, as I explain below, is that, unlike real science, pseudoscience is unfalsifiable.
2019, Kevin McCain, Kostas Kampourakis, editors, What is Scientific Knowledge?, Routledge, →ISBN:
Antonyms
Deriveds
unfalsifiability · unfalsifiably