They're sort of inverses of each other; a better way to put it is "verificationism" vs. "falsificationism".
The key difference is that a verification model seeks to establish that a theory is true, while a falsification model seeks to establish that it is not. Verification models cannot achieve their goal. Falsification models can.
This means throwing out the idea that you will ever have a theory "proven" to be "true", but thanks to the problem of induction you weren't (in the general scientific-method sense) ever going to get that anyway. Instead, you have theories which have been proven false (since falsification gives you counterexamples to universally-quantified conjectures, which allow the valid deductive conclusion of falsity of those conjectures), and theories which have not yet been proven false.
Importantly, you never say that the latter group of theories are "true", "likely to be true", etc.; you only and always say either that they've not yet been shown false or, more commonly, that they have thus far survived attempts at falsification.
To a lot of people it does seem like meaningless semantics, but for people interested in the demarcation problem (which is anything but unimportant these days) it's quite significant because it offers a viable framework for a solution.
thanks for the clarification. I guess the problem arose because I never thought of induction as a method for finding the "truth" per se, but rather as a method of finding consistent correlations (with direct cause and effect being a special case of correlation where the correlation coefficient is 1).
The key difference is that a verification model seeks to establish that a theory is true, while a falsification model seeks to establish that it is not. Verification models cannot achieve their goal. Falsification models can.
This means throwing out the idea that you will ever have a theory "proven" to be "true", but thanks to the problem of induction you weren't (in the general scientific-method sense) ever going to get that anyway. Instead, you have theories which have been proven false (since falsification gives you counterexamples to universally-quantified conjectures, which allow the valid deductive conclusion of falsity of those conjectures), and theories which have not yet been proven false.
Importantly, you never say that the latter group of theories are "true", "likely to be true", etc.; you only and always say either that they've not yet been shown false or, more commonly, that they have thus far survived attempts at falsification.
To a lot of people it does seem like meaningless semantics, but for people interested in the demarcation problem (which is anything but unimportant these days) it's quite significant because it offers a viable framework for a solution.