"Be suspicious of a theory if more and more hypotheses are needed to support it as new facts become available, or as new considerations are brought to bear." (Sir Fred Hoyle & Nalin C Wickramasinghe, "Evolution from Space", 1981)
"All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again." (Ernst Mayr, "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance", 1982)
"In a modern professional vocabulary a hypothesis is an imaginative preconception of what might be true in the form of a declaration with verifiable deductive consequences. It no longer tows ‘gratuitous’, ‘mere’, or ‘wild’ behind it, and the pejorative usage (‘Evolution is a mere hypothesis’, ‘It is only a hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer’) is one of the outward signs of little learning."
"In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and
impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data
are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive. […] The teacher has
forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys
no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to
see."
"There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information should shoot a hole in it, one hates to tear it down because it once was beautiful and whole." (John Steinbeck, "Sea of Cortez", 1982)
"The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system [...] simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems." (Jerry Fodor, "Modularity of Mind", 1983)
"But there is trouble in store for anyone who surrenders to the temptation of mistaking an elegant hypothesis for a certainty: the readers of detective stories know this quite well." (Primo Levi, "The Periodic Table", 1984)
"Philosophies can be judged, at most, on the grounds of the perspicacity with which they decide that something is worthy of becoming the starting point for a global explanatory hypothesis." (Umberto Eco, "Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language", 1984)
"Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look
for your own examples, dicover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is
the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the
degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?" (Paul R Halmos, "I Want
to be a Mathematician", 1985)
"Failing to reject a null hypothesis is distinctly different from proving a null hypothesis; the difference in these interpretations is not merely a semantic point. Rather, the two interpretations can lead to quite different biological conclusions." (David F Parkhurst, "Interpreting Failure to Reject a Null Hypothesis", Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America Vol. 66, 1985)
"Mathematics is not a deductive science – that’s a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don’t just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork." (Paul R Halmos, "I Want to Be A Mathematician", 1985)
"Science is human experience systematically extended (by intent, methodology and instrumentation) for the purpose of learning more about the natural world and for the critical empirical testing and possible falsification of all ideas about the natural world. Scientific hypotheses may incorporate only elements of the natural empirical world, and thus may contain no element of the supernatural." (Robert E Kofahl, Correctly Redefining Distorted Science: A Most Essential Task", Creation Research Society Quarterly Vol. 23, 1986)
"Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion." (Stephen M Stigler, "Testing Hypotheses or fitting Models? Another Look at Mass Extinctions" [in "Neutral Models in Biology"], 1987)
"Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the hypothesis that underlies an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization." (George Soros, "The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market", 1987)
"All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data." (Maurice Allais, "An Outline of My Main Contributions to Economic Science", [Noble lecture] 1988)
"Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory." (Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", 1988)
"The heart of the scientific method is the problem-hypothesis-test process. And, necessarily, the scientific method involves predictions. And predictions, to be useful in scientific methodology, must be subject to test empirically." (Paul Davies, "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to, Order the Universe", 1988)
"The model and the theory it represents must be accepted, at least temporarily, or rejected, depending on the agreement or disagreement between observed data and the hypotheses and implications of the model. When neither the hypotheses nor the implications of a theory can be confronted with the real world, that theory is devoid of any scientific interest. Mere logical, even mathematical, deduction remains worthless in terms of the understanding of reality if it is not closely linked to that reality." (Maurice Allais, "An Outline of My Main Contributions to Economic Science", [Noble lecture] 1988)
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