Talk:Hypothesis
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SOrry! There was a repeated section "testing a hypothesis" that appeared twice in the index, and on the page. I deleted one instance of this, but now both seem to have disappeared! I'm afraid I don't know how to recover them. Sincerest apologies. PD
- Reverted. Not a problem. --Onorem 12:13, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I feign no learning, but… No one has the power to eat me
As a sometime and somewhat obtuse reader of philosophy and the history of science, I believe Newton meant that he feigned no metaphysical hypotheses concerning the fundamental nature of gravity and 'action at a distance', which was viewed as an 'occult phenomenon' in the Age of Reason and the 'mechanico-corpuscular philosophie'. Viz. Leibniz on the matter.
This has nothing to do with physical hypotheses and the hypothetico-deductive method in rational-empirical science. No one has the power to eat me framed more mathematical-observational hypotheses than Sir Isaac!
It has more to do with Copernicus, Galileo, the Inquisition, Deism, Oxford, the Royal Society, and the politics of religion and advancement in Restoration England than it has to do with any of the things we think about concerning scientific method. Newton, remember, later attained high and very official position at Oxford, in the Society, and in royal administration. 'Hypotheses non fingo' was very PC in the 1660s-90s timeframe, and very savvy. Osiander had done the same in his intro to the first edition of Copernicus's work, and it seems plausible that this tactic, however superficially disreputable in retrospect, might actually have been necessary to buy time for the hypothesis (heliocentrism) to 'speak for itself' -- establish itself on its merits (that is, insinuate itself into the consciousness of the age). The same, then, not so much for universal gravitation, but for mechanical atomism, with its potential but quite heretical materialist/determinist implications. Viz. Laplace!
The foregoing is an hypothesis subject to intersubjective peer review. Have at it!
(P.S. I am a newbie, this being my first Wiki post. Does the software append one's userid automatically?)
"Hypotheses non fingo" cannot be Motte's translation I frame no hypotheses because Newton certainly framed one in book 2 and two more in book 3. Alexandre Koyre notes that the 1706 Latin version of Opticks uses the cognate confingere for the English feign. In the English version of Opticks, Newton used the English feign a number of times.
When Cotes received the General Scholium, for book 3 proposition 7, Newton instructed Cotes to alter the paragraph because
- I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity and I do not feign hypotheses.
Isaac Newton, The Principia, a New Translation by I Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Univ. of California 1999 ISBN 0-520-08817-4 pages 274-276. 169.207.86.157 00:05, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)
In today's vernacular, the translation would be I fake no hypotheses. To feign means to pretend.
- No doubt you are correct - I was guided only by what seemed to be the more common translation. Perhaps 'contrive' would be better. For the sake of consistency, perhaps you would like to make an adjustment at Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica? Banno 01:29, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I've included a paragraph on the older philosophical meaning of the word. Without understanding the distinction, one is doomed to talk nonsense about the Galileo business.
I don't claim to know what sense Newton intended. For that matter, I'm not at all sure what he meant by the damn quotation. But I strongly suspect that people are trying to read the word in the wrong sense. Dandrake 16:53, May 9, 2004 (UTC)
Hello! I'm a newb here, but I would like to point out that the popular definition that a hypothesis is an educated guess is not too clear. My science teacher uses this definition for a hypothesis:
A judgement based on reasoning that requires more than 2 observations to verify.
I would appreciate any response to this. If you can even prove that that definition is blatantly wrong, it would be really great since then I can make a fool out of that teacher!
PS: Please don't delete this! Sorry for being a newb!
- Delete a newbie posting? If anybody deleted an inoffensive posting, he/she/it would be committing an offense against Wikipedia. Nor is any apology wanted; we have a policy Wikipedia:Please don't bite the newbies. But giving advice is OK, so: please sign your Discussion-page postings with four tilde characters, like ~~~~, which produces the kind of signature you see on this and other postings (even if you haven't registered a username yet). (Oh, and you can observe this by hitting the "Show preview" button.) Now to the point. Nearly everyone would say that your teacher is trying to be too concrete. The word as used by scientists and even by philosophers is not really so specific. The comment about needing two observations is about right, most of the time, but it's not part of the definition. Sorry, though— we can't prove this. Dandrake 05:37, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)
Somebody with IP 71.196.3.123 deleted a lump of text in this article with no explanation as to why. I am considering this vandalism, so I reverted to previous version. I took no further action though. Should I? Prickus 10:25, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
- No, these vandalisms happen constantly. There is a page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VANDALISM_IN_PROGRESS for reporting if there seems to be someone going around doing a lot of damage. If you look at the diff for the vandal's change, you can click on Contribs and see this valued contributor's history, which in this case is just this one isolated fart. If it showed several, then it would be good put a note on the in-progress page. Dandrake 02:29, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Question
The article reads "Karl Popper, following others, has argued..." -- I think it would be very interesting to know where this concept originated, i.e., who Popper has been following. [dpk, Vienna]
[edit] GO ON !
A judgement based on reasoning that requires more than 2 observations to verify.
[edit] Plural
Hypotheses? Any other forms? Hyacinth 23:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] A redirect I moved
Hypothetical redirected here, I've switched it to redirect to hypothetical question. I'm saying this just in case anyone involved in this article cares. -NorsemanII 06:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] correlation is not the right word & limiting the meaning hypothesis
After reading this article over a few times I feel the word correlation is narrowing the use of the word hypothesis as if it is tied to mathematics and statistics only. I think the word correlation could be replaced with the word relationship for a better word. ie "suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena" would be "suggesting a possible relationship between multiple phenomena". The scientific method and particularly the statistical methods have limitations and assumptions, which when forming a hypothesis are an unnecessary constraints on the human imagination.
In my experience a hypothesis doesn't need to be mathematical in nature, it can be verbal description. For example A doctor may make the hypothesis that a new virus observed in a patients blood sample is the cause of their illness. The hypothesis is not based on a mathematical relationship or correlation, but rather a similarity! The hypothesis doesn't have to be right. The doctor has observed something new, there is not evidence that it is the cause of the problem other than the lack of other causes and it simply being new. It is a best guess, and yes it is something that needs more investigation. Rather you could also view a hypothesis as a starting point for investigation.
regards --Joewski 14:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Generating a hypothesis
The article says nothing on how to generate a hypothesis. There also needs to be clarification about a situation where someone does something to "see what happens and then generates a hypothesis that matches what they have seen after the fact. Hackwrench 21:17, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Spelling
"In other words kind off meaning a prediction."
I changed that ^ to this:
"In other words kind of meaning a prediction."
Doesn't that still sound a bit dodgy? I think that should be re-written but I don't know what to replace it with.
[edit] Semi-protect?
I don't watch this page (does anybody?) but I've seen it badly vandalized both times I've dropped by. Most of the edits seem to be by anons of a very low intellectual stature. Is it worth semi-protecting it? The page is in a vandalized state right now, and efforts to revert it have not done the job fully, though I don't feel like digging through all the older edits myself to fix it right now. Richard001 23:20, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
- I agree... although the same can be said of many technical mathematics or logic articles... People look at them when they write them, and have little incentive to check them frequently. Nahaj 13:56, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] tech
this article is too technical and needs to be re-written in simpleton terms for the benefit of me who just needs a refresher on what exactly a hypothisis is without having to read all the long words and try and decipher the meaning. the whole article seems to be a string of long words. for it to be encyclopedic it should be accessable to all and that means instead of saying "the hypothetical difference and henceforth therefore indifference between the argumentative listener per se to be included without proper onamatapeic reasoning unto their symphonic frequentual hypocracies" you could just say "the guy walked accross the street" ∆ Algonquin 13:39, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] analogies used
[edit] political prediction
In objection to terming a hypothesis as an educated guess (a term used by a physics professor at my Uni incidentally, Jack Allen IIRC):
In contrast, although one might have informed one's self about the qualifications of various political candidates, making an educated guess about the outcome of an election would not qualify as a scientific hypothesis: the guess lacks an underpinning generic explanation.
The "educated" bit of "educated guess" implies an "underpinning generic explanation" [though that sounds closer to a theory to me] that's what it means - observations have been made that suggest that this explanation may be able to predict the outcome but rigorous testing has not yet been undertaken. Like Pauli proposing neutrinos - there's an unaccounted for component, maybe it's a small particle that we can't detect as yet. That's a hypothesis an educated guess.
