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Science

Hypotheses? Forget About It!

So says our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci.

Newton famously said “hypotheses non fingo,” meaning, “I frame no hypotheses” – a rather startling position for a scientist to advocate. Isn’t science precisely the activity of constructing and testing hypotheses about the natural world? Certainly this has been the view of influential philosophers of science such as Karl Popper. Popper said that scientific hypotheses can never be proven correct, but they can be falsified, that is proven wrong. For Popper, science progresses through the successive elimination of wrong hypotheses. Many scientists proudly ignore philosophy, but Popperian falsification is one of the only two philosophical concepts you are likely to find in an introductory science textbook.

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