A claim counts as scientific only if evidence could prove it wrong. Knowledge grows by bold guesses and hard tests, not by collecting agreement.
- +Fits Positivism, Critical Realism
- –Tension with Critical Theory, Post-structuralism
The longer story
Karl Popper asked what separates science from everything else, and answered: a scientific claim sticks its neck out. It says what would have to happen for it to be wrong. "All swans are white" can never be proved by counting white swans, but one black swan refutes it. So researchers should make bold conjectures and then try as hard as they can to break them. What survives is not certain, only the best we have so far.
That makes him the natural companion for hypothesis-testing designs: experiments, surveys, anything with a prediction that could fail. In art history, Ernst Gombrich borrowed the idea directly, describing image-making as "making and matching", a cycle of trial and correction.
Two cautions. Popper did not call himself a positivist; he argued with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and thought their search for verification a mistake. And his public dispute with Adorno in the 1960s, the "positivism dispute", is the classic statement of the quarrel between testing theories and criticising society.