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Science distinguishes a law or theory from facts. [4] Calling a law a fact is ambiguous, an overstatement, or an equivocation. [5] The nature of scientific laws has been much discussed in philosophy, but in essence scientific laws are simply empirical conclusions reached by the scientific method; they are intended to be neither laden with ...
While theory in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles that explains an observable phenomenon in natural terms. [127] [128] "Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable", [129] and evolution is a theory in the same sense as germ theory or the theory of gravitation. [130]
[14] [15] Fact is also used in a wider sense to mean any theory for which there is overwhelming evidence. [16] According to Douglas J. Futuyma, [6] A fact is a hypothesis that is so firmly supported by evidence that we assume it is true, and act as if it were true. In the sense that evolution is overwhelmingly validated by the evidence, it is a ...
Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" seems to follow a mathematical theory describing fluids in nature. He couldn't have understood the equations, which came about decades after his death.
A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory seeks to explain "how" or "why", whereas a fact is a simple, basic observation and a law is an empirical description of a relationship between facts and/or other laws.
Pandemic conspiracy-mongers shared the stage with scientists and public health advocates at a Stanford University conference. Should they have even been let into the room?
Francis Bacon, articulating inductivism in England, is often falsely stereotyped as a naive inductivist. [11] [12] Crudely explained, the "Baconian model" advises to observe nature, propose a modest law that generalizes an observed pattern, confirm it by many observations, venture a modestly broader law, and confirm that, too, by many more observations, while discarding disconfirmed laws. [13]
In the scientific context, the term semi-empirical is used for qualifying theoretical methods that use, in part, basic axioms or postulated scientific laws and experimental results. Such methods are opposed to theoretical ab initio methods, which are purely deductive and based on first principles .