Popperian Fallibilism and the Discipline of Modal Restraint: Semantic Entailment, Spurious Necessity and Scientific Explanation

Philosophical reflection on scientific laws often struggles to distinguish between "mere" accidental regularities and "genuine" laws. This paper argues that the felt necessity attributed to certain scientific generalizations is not an empirical discovery of "physical necessity," but a result of definitive semantic entailment. By introducing a distinction between Descriptive (DS) and Definitive (DF) truth-characters, I diagnose "lawlikeness" as a category error termed "possibling": the projection of semantic closure onto empirical inquiry. Using the direct foil of Salmon’s (1989) modal desiderata to illustrate this error, I apply a Gödelian constraint (1931) to the substitution of external necessity for internal inconceivability. I conclude that Popperian fallibilism constitutes a vital modal hygiene required to prevent scientific explanation from collapsing into dogmatic derivation.