The Black Swan

"All swans are white" is a falsifiable claim – it could be proven wrong.

Black Swan, Claremont (Cygnus atratus), Tasmania, Australia

Even so, the statement all swans are white is testable by being falsifiable. For, if in testing many swans, the researcher finds a single black swan, then the statement all swans are white would be falsified by the counterexample of the single black swan. See:Inductive categorical inference

The demarcation problem (or boundary problem^[1]) in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science. The boundaries are commonly drawn between science and non-science, between science and pseudoscience, between science and philosophy and between science and religion.^[2] A form of this problem, known as the generalized problem of demarcation subsumes all four cases.
After over a century of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in varied fields, and despite broad agreement on the basics of scientific method,^[3] the boundaries between science and non-science continue to be debated.^[4]

Our major conclusion is simply a reaffirmation of the general statement that perceptual organization is powerfully determined by expectations built upon past commerce with the environment. When such expectations are violated by the environment, the perceiver's behavior can be described as resistance to the recognition of the unexpected or incongruous. The resistance manifests itself in subtle and complex but nevertheless distinguishable perceptual responses. Among the perceptual processes which implement this resistance are (1) the dominance of one principle of organization which prevents the appearance of incongruity and (2) a form of "partial assimilation to expectancy" which we have called compromise. When these responses fail and when correct recognition does not occur, what results may best be described as perceptual disruption. Correct [p. 223] recognition itself results when inappropriate expectancies are discarded after failure of confirmation. See:On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm

See Also:

•  Book review: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman -