The Hypothesis

We read an article for class on Tuesday, entitled "A Brief History of the Hypothesis." It was an interesting piece of information that discussed the evolution of the word, its uses as opposed to a model, and the use of a question instead of a hypothesis.

I've known the word hypothesis since probably around third grade, and it's been drilled into my head in every science class ever since. This article spent a considerable amount of time discussing the critiques of deductive reasoning and the use of a hypothesis; it also defended inductive reasoning against its philosophical critics.

I have my own musings on the subject. While hypotheses are valuable and at times provide a helpful outline for research I remember becoming frustrated throughout my years of study by their restrictions. Many times I was just curious about a subject. I had questions that I wanted to investigate but because I was bound to a curriculum that was bound to deductive reasoning, I wasn't able to pursue any answers. I had to make an educated guess, a hypothesis, and construct a confined experiment that would answer my narrowly formulated idea. The hypothesis would fail and I would have to start over with nowhere to go. And I'm not even talking about the research I'm doing now; I mean I remember being in 4th grade, trying to come up with a hypothesis for what would happen when 3 different colored liquids were poured into a beaker. I would have been a much less frustrated 9-year-old if I'd been able to just take the liquids and try different things just to see and explore.

That's what I like and prefer about inductive reasoning, the use of a model, and the asking of a question. It may not be philosophically appropriate to assume that what has always happened in the past will always happen in the future, but it's certainly practical. If we assumed we could never know what has happened today will happen tomorrow, there would be chaos and the entire human experience of learning would be disrupted. Inductive reasoning may not be philosophically sound, but it's by far more fun. It's the scientific method kids use when they're exploring something new for the first time. It's the reason I love science--the expedition.

My current project is an expedition into the human genome to see if there's anything new to discover (which is a silly assertion because there's always something new to discover in genetics; don't ever let me get on the subject of epigenetics because I will not stop talking).