Why Karl Popper's philosophy isn't 'falsificationISM'.

Even though Popper has gained most of his fame and reputation from his scientific theory of falsificationism he understood that his theory of the falsificationist methodology is “decidedly unempirical” and belongs not to science but philosophy as a “metascience”. Popper argued that science could not be reduced to a method, but his falsificationism was such a method. It should be noted that Popper, himself did not like the term “falsificationism ” as the “-ism” connoted an ideological commitment. Where I use this term however, it is as a shorthand for Popper’s body of arguments on this point, rather than in any dogmatic methodological absolutist sense. Popper gloated in his autobiography that he “killed” verificationism and there by the rational for the Vienna Circle, yet the arguments used to kill absolute verification have also been used to kill absolute falsification. If indeed it is always possible that future observations will contradict a theory, then it is always possible that future observations will resurrect a theory hitherto demonstrated to have been refuted.

[naranieckisliberalartslect]

I think Popper's fallibilism and emphasis on falsification, uncertainty and the provisionality of knowledge over verification and the 'quest for certainty', has something of the theology of the Fall about it. Man's knowledge is flawed, but there is something redemptive in the Baconian sense of our struggle to learn despite this fallen or fallible state. Popper often indeed referred to Adam.