A fact is something established beyond all doubt, on the basis of evidence and reasoning, to exist or have happened. To establish something beyond doubt, there must be some awareness of doubt. Which means some cognitive process that can objectively and completely examine the evidence and reasoning.
You give too much weight to what a fact is - a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation. I may have underplayed, but you have overplayed it.
Not really. A hypothesis is a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument, and tested on the basis of evidence. A hypothesis may be proposed as a means of organising facts into patterns, but need not be.
It is not necessary that a hypothesis predict something not yet known. It is required to predict something that can be tested through evidence, and falsifiable if conduct of the test yields a result that is not predicted.
A hypothesis is not required to be reproducible. For example, a hypothesis can be tested statistically. The samples, from which statistics are derived, provide a body of evidence and provides evidence to accept or reject a hypothesis to some specified level of confidence. However, given the same samples, derived statistical quantities, and level of confidence then the same conclusion will always be drawn. But given a different set of samples (eg by doing the same measurement process at a different time) a different conclusion may be drawn.
If the level of confidence is required to be 100% (probability 1), then testing the hypothesis represents proof or disproof.
Well, yes and no - so let's go with the wiki version: People refer to a trial solution to a problem as a hypothesis — often called an "educated guess" — because it provides a suggested solution based on the evidence. Experimenters may test and reject several hypotheses before solving the problem.
According to Schick and Vaughn,[1] researchers weighing up alternative hypotheses may take into consideration:
* Testability (compare falsifiability as discussed above)
* Simplicity (as in the application of "Occam's razor", discouraging the postulation of excessive numbers of entities)
* Scope - the apparent application of the hypothesis to multiple cases of phenomena
* Fruitfulness - the prospect that a hypothesis may explain further phenomena in the future
* Conservatism - the degree of "fit" with existing recognized knowledge-systems....
That's not really true. A theory is, in general, a coherent body of propositions that offer an explanation for a class of phenomena. A theory can make predictions that are not possible on the basis of the individual propositions. The theory can be tested by gathering evidence to prove or disprove any of the component propositions, or phenomena predicted by the theory.
This is a pretty good definition but I would like it restated a little for clarity -
In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it can in everyday speech. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from or is supported by rigorous observations in the natural world, or by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense,
a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations, and is predictive, logical, and testable. In principle, scientific theories are always tentative, and subject to corrections, inclusion in a yet wider theory, or succession. Commonly, many more specific hypotheses may be logically bound together by just one or two theories. As a rule for use of the term, theories tend to deal with much broader sets of universals than do hypotheses, which ordinarily deal with much more specific sets of phenomena or specific applications of a theory.
That's not true. A law (in the philosophical sense) is a statement of a relationship or sequence of phenomena that are invariable some set of conditions. In other words, if a set of conditions can be identified under which that theory is true, the component propositions of that theory become laws.
Laws are simply theories for which there is a significant body of evidence and no refuting evidence. Laws can therefore be disproven like any theory (eg with a counter-example) although, given the amount of effort that goes into trying to prove or disprove a theory before it is declared a law, that is possible but unlikely.
A law is not required to be true outside the conditions for which it is established. For example, according to Einstein, Newton's laws of mechanics are only an approximation. However, the error in Newton's laws is less than the error in measurement in many practical conditions (most notably, when relative speed of object and observer is very different from speed of light). So under those practical conditions those laws still hold.
Well, no. This
article states it quite well so i will quote:
"The origin of this confusion has it's roots in the history of the development of science. When we speak of early, classical physics, we talk about laws, Newton's laws of motion for instance, the ideas have the weight of veracity. After all, the word "law" has a serious and strictly defined meaning in our culture. Back when Newton declared his laws, he believed them to be absolute descriptions of how the universe worked. At the time, they were irrefutable. We now know that his laws are in fact approximations, rules that work when describing motion on the macroscopic scale but which break at the quantum scale.
Since that time, science has gotten warier about describing anything as being absolute.
Science, and physics in particular, is a tool to root out the true nature of reality. It can describe only what it observes which may or may not be true in every case. In order to say if something is absolutely true, every single possible case of a particular phenomena must be observed. In a universe as vast as ours, that's completely impractical. Science can say if something is probably true all the time if observations of a phenomena are the same in many cases. This tiny bit of waffling bothers many people who are not familiar with the inner workings of science. Shouldn't something be always true if it is true at all? Science just can't commit all the way to absolute - otherwise it wouldn't be science, it would be faith.
So science has tossed the use of "law" in favor of "theory". This "theory" does not mean "hypothesis" which is a speculation. In this case, think of music theory - definitely not a hypothesis, but a working set of rules that define a body of knowledge." The fact that 'laws of nature/science' is still used in general conversation does not validate its use in science.
I agree. A hypotheses and theories are key parts of scientific method: hypotheses and theories must be developed so they may be tested through evidence.
And creationism cannot be tested. It must be assumed, or taken on faith. According to scientific method, it can be never proven nor disproven.
This is the direction I was going when it got too late in the evening and my meds started kicking in.
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