disconfirm

English

Etymology

dis- +‎ confirm

Verb

disconfirm (third-person singular simple present disconfirms, present participle disconfirming, simple past and past participle disconfirmed)

(transitive) To establish the falsity of a claim or belief; to show or to tend to show that a theory or hypothesis is not valid.
- 1943, Carl G. Hempel, "A Purely Syntactical Definition of Confirmation," The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 8, no. 4, p. 122,
  The empirical data obtained in a test—or, as we shall prefer to say, the observation sentences describing those data—may then either confirm or disconfirm the given hypothesis, or they may be neutral with respect to it.

Synonyms

infirm

Antonyms

confirm

Related terms

disconfirmation
disconfirmatory

Translations

to establish the falsity of a claim or belief

Portuguese: desconfirmar

References

“disconfirm” in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
“disconfirm” in Microsoft's Encarta World English Dictionary, North American Edition (2007)
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)