What is disconfirmation?

Example: You believe you are bad at public speaking. For years, every stumble at the podium confirms this schema. Then a colleague records you giving a spontaneous hallway explanation of a complex topic — clear, confident, compelling. One disconfirming instance does not just dent the schema. It restructures it entirely. You are not bad at public speaking. You are bad at performing scripted presentations under pressure. That single falsification is more informative than a hundred confirmations ever were, because it forces you to replace a coarse model with a precise one.

This concept is part of Schema Validation in the How to Think curriculum.