Epistemology · Philosophy of Science
What distinguishes scientific knowledge from metaphysics, ideology, speculation, or ordinary belief?
A theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that could in principle be refuted by observation.
Held by Critical Rationalism
A field is scientific when its practitioners share a paradigm and work within it on puzzles that the paradigm itself certifies as solvable.
What is scientific is not a single theory but a series of them, and the series earns the title by predicting novel facts rather than only absorbing known ones.
Falsification testing derives a risky prediction from a theory and looks for the observation that would refute it, treating survival of serious attempts at refutation as the only support a theory can earn.
Demarcation asks what makes science distinctive without turning science into a myth. The problem runs from empiricist trust in observation through positivist and logical-positivist programs to later philosophy of science.
The answer matters because modern philosophy often borrows authority from science while also questioning its limits.