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The hypothesis of Andreas Cellarius, showing the planetary motions in eccentric and epicyclical orbits. A hypothesis (pl.: hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. A scientific hypothesis must be based on observations and make a testable and reproducible prediction about reality, in a process beginning with an educated guess or ...
The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodology of scientific inquiry, not the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straightforward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philosophers and scientists have argued for the primacy of ...
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. [1] [2] Modern science is typically divided into two or three major branches: [3] the natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, and biology), which study the physical world; and the social sciences (e.g., economics, psychology, and sociology), which ...
The consistent application by statisticians of Neyman and Pearson's convention of representing "the hypothesis to be tested" (or "the hypothesis to be nullified") with the expression H 0 has led to circumstances where many understand the term "the null hypothesis" as meaning "the nil hypothesis" – a statement that the results in question have ...
See also C. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science 49 (1966) ([T]he statements constituting a scientific explanation must be capable of empirical test); K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge 37 (5th ed. 1989) ([T]he criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or ...
Social-science methodologist Donald T. Campbell, who emphasized hypothesis testing throughout his career, later increasingly emphasized that the essence of science is "not experimentation per se" but instead the iterative competition of "plausible rival hypotheses", a process that at any given phase may start from evidence or may start from ...
A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be or that has been repeatedly tested and has corroborating evidence in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.
In science and philosophy, an ad hoc hypothesis is a hypothesis added to a theory in order to save it from being falsified.. For example, a person that wants to believe in leprechauns can avoid ever being proven wrong by using ad hoc hypotheses (e.g., by adding "they are invisible", then "their motives are complex", and so on).