Karl Popper 's concept of falsifiability is a basic test of scientific hypotheses.
Popper points out that no hypothesis can ever be confirmed by reality.
His favorite example is that if the hypothesis is swans are white, then finding a single black swan falsifies the hypothesis, whereas finding any number of white swans can only corroborate , but not confirm it, since there may still be a black one yet undiscovered. Popper, whose central examples were drawn from physics , attacked psychoanalysis as unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless because there is no empirical test of the unconscious motivations it alleges. Popper's critique raises a methodological question that goes beyond the particulars of the Freudian system. Freudians are not interested in falsifying the Oedipus complex, but in using it as an explanatory mechanism. In the domain of meaning , which exists only in human language, falsifiability becomes a matter of internal coherence .