I was reading over the last paragraph of my last entry, about Kuhn, and it led me to think about the status of hypotheses, or ideas, that either have not yet been investigated using the scientific method or are in the process of being investigated.
In the judicial system, we tend to go with the innocent until proven guilty strategy. We go with this strategy because we figure it would be worse to say that an innocent person was guilty than to say that a guilty person was innocent, and we recognize that people really aren’t very good at suspending judgement. We aren’t good at saying- “The person might be innocent, or they might be guilty. I don’t know, and I won’t decide right now.”
We’re in a similar situation with a hypothesis that hasn’t been tested. The hypothesis might be true, or it might be false. The general strategy in this case is to assume that the hypothesis is true, and then try to prove it false. Of course, this tends to bias the direction of scientific inquiry, because you aren’t going to be too motivated to go to a bunch of work to show that something is false if you already believe it to be false.
Personally, I think that taking a position of
non-judgement about the truth or falsity of an idea, theory or hypothesis is a viable
alternative in many cases- but it is certainly also a more challenging
alternative, because it requires us to live with uncertainty, which in
turn can make it difficult to know how to behave. As far as religious
thought goes, I currently generally describe myself as an atheist because
I rarely have a belief in what you might describe as a single, coalesced
‘God’, particularly one with some sort of awareness or causal powers.
However, apparently there are many different
flavours of agnosticism, and sometimes I’ll call myself agnostic
simply to denote that I am not without an interest in the larger groking
of the universe.
posted at 12:17 on Sun, 25 Feb, 2007 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.