OR, TO PUT IT another way: what isn’t science? Why do we call physics and chemistry sciences, but not astrology or crystal healing? That’s the question that interested the philosopher Karl Popper. His conclusion was that it’s all a question of proof.
It’s not a question of proving that a theory is true, which Popper argued is impossible for any true science. Rather, scientific theories can only be falsified – through experimentation and observation. No amount of confirmatory experiments can ever prove a theory true; but a single, reproducible experiments can prove it false.
And that’s why pseudosciences such as psychoanalysis, according to Popper, aren’t real science: they can’t be falsified, because they don’t lay themselves open to rational testing.
