hypothesis about a cell
Answers
Explanation:
Two terms used as frameworks for scientific experimentation—the “hypothesis” and the “model”—carry distinct philosophical assumptions, with important consequences for the practicing scientist.
Main Text
Scientists are commonly taught to frame their experiments with a “hypothesis”—an idea or postulate that must be phrased as a statement of fact, so that it can be subjected to falsification. The hypothesis is constructed in advance of the experiment; it is therefore unproven in its original form. The very idea of “proof” of a hypothesis is problematic on philosophical grounds because the hypothesis is established to be falsified, not verified. The second framework for experimental design involves building a model as an explanation for a data set. A model is distinct from a hypothesis in that it is constructed after data are derived. In contrast to the hypothesis, the model must be held up for verification—its success is determined by its ability to predict a particular outcome. Furthermore, an unsuccessful, or not fully successful, model need not be scrapped in the way that the alternative framework urges the rejection of a falsified hypothesis, but it may instead serve as the starting point for a suitably refined successor. The concept of a model's “verification” requires an acceptance of “inductive reasoning”—a form of logic that allows the scientist to both generalize a particular result and say that the same result will occur in the future—which itself has been criticized. Although many scientists use the term “hypothesis” when they mean “model,” we will maintain the distinction that the hypothesis is an unproven premise whereas the model is data derived, to discriminate between “top-down premise/deduction” and “bottom-up data/induction.” A recent article proposes that the availability of large amounts of scientific data renders the need for a pre-existing hypothesis obsolete (Anderson, 2008). Given the ability of scientists to gather vast amounts of scientific data—by sequencing genomes, surveying changes in the expression of every gene, or analyzing proteomic changes in response to a stimulus—is a hypothesis the most appropriate way to frame such experiments (Glass, 2006)? Here, we discuss the philosophical reasoning that motivated original and current notions of the hypothesis and its implications for scientific experimental design.