Professor Popper deals ... with the problem of induction very simply: he shows that it does not exist: and a principle of induction is therefore a logician's dream. Scientists do not behave as Bacon thought – industriously gathering "countless grapes ripe and in season" so that the wine of science may flow (or even industriously stuffing birds with snow). They work the other way round. They fling out hypotheses: and they test these, not prove them, by controlled and selective experiments. Science is the quest for truth, not the possession of it. It is also the challenge to refutation, it seeks not primarily the verification of its hypotheses but the kind of evidence which might falsify them. What Professor Popper is saying is that theories are not verifiable (in any sense which would satisfy a logical positivist). They use facts to test the predictions which they imply, but they do not originate in the expectation of final proof.
From Professor Popper's bold and simple conception there are consequences both general and particular far too many to enumerate. ... Among the general ones is a fruitful demarcation between sciences and what Professor Popper has elsewhere called pseudo-sciences, particularly Freudianism and Marxism. It is a commonplace about both these systems that far from challenging "falsification," as Professor Popper would say, they endeavour to impose finality and they equate criticism with rationalized "resistance."
Notice that last sentence. Keep it in mind the next time you hear a response to a criticism of some widely publicized theory.
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