Talk:String theory

Falsifiability is from Pragmatism, not Positivism

Advocates of logical positivism such as Wittgenstein, Carnap, et. al. held that scientific propositions should be verifiable, thus the name "positivism". The question became what, exactly, it meant for something to be verifiable, so the logical positivists developed a theory of logic & language to be put to use in the course of empirical investigations.

Karl Popper and W.V. Quine were the pragmatists who took issue with the positivist position of verifiability and required a falsifiability condition from empirical claims on the grounds that one could never actually verify a claim through empirical investigation, but one could most assuredly prove it wrong through experimentation.

Because of the strong mathematical content of String Theory, a positivist would be more likely to accept it as a scientific theory than a pragmatist.