Hypothesis? Just a fancy word for guess.

I have this strong feeling that for a large section of the population just the term ‘scientific method’ is a cue to turn off and tune out (as Timothy Leary very nearly said), but it’s pretty much a formalisation of something that we recognise from normal life and use constantly. 

So maybe we should approach it from a sexier perspective. Murder is sexy; I'm sure I read that somewhere.

It’s murder out there I tell you.

When we hear two different and conflicting assertions how do we decide which to believe, and why should we care? Well, for a start we all love a good courtroom drama and lives might be on the line.

In a murder trial you have two opposing views, that the accused is guilty and that he’s not.  Which is true and how can you decide?

Innocent until proven guilty

In the UK and US system of law there’s a presumption of innocence. It’s up to the accuser to prove the case, not the defendant to prove innocence.  Scientific method makes the same presumption. 

If you make an assertion then it’s up to you to prove it is true, not for anyone else to prove you are wrong.  If you can’t provide a good reason why it might be true, then you shouldn’t expect anyone to believe it.

If you are claiming anything, whether it’s that drinking molten lead is good for a sore throat or that you speak with the voice of God, it’s up to you to prove it’s true. 

If you are one of those who nods your head in agreement with someone who doesn’t offer any evidence then I have a very nice bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you cheap, or you may want to join the Scientologists because they love people like you.

Making the accusation

When the prosecution makes its case it has to set up a plausible scenario. It has to set out that a crime happened and an explanation of who committed it.

In other words they have to present a case which takes account of the facts as they are known (It’s obvious this is a hypothetical case. If the courts had to be as rigorous as science our jails would be empty).

It was Mr Green in kitchen with the candlestick.

In science this is the HYPOTHESIS.   

At the simplest level a hypothesis is commonly considered to have to:

• Offer an explanation of a phenomena or event (like how Dr Black’s dead body turned up in the kitchen).
• Be consist with what’s already known (If Dr Black is happy and well and waving from the gallery there’s not a lot of point in accusing someone of shuffling him off this mortal coil),
• Be logically solid (Dr Black is dead, it’s black at night, bats fly at night, so Dr Black must have been killed by a bat. I think not.)
• Be able to be tested against new evidence.

However, not all hypothesis are created equal. 

The more data a hypothesis is consistent with, and the fewer unknowns and conjectures it introduces, then the stronger it is.  If it’s very strong indeed then it can be considered a ‘working hypothesis’  and - for convenience sake -  used as if it is true.

M‘lud, for my next witness I call…

THE NEXT POST WILL LOOK AT THE CONCEPT OF 'PROOF'

My opinion is a good as yours, and I know that's true because I said it.

I recently got into a very heated argument with an old school friend around some views he was expounding that I thought were not only nonsense but truly dangerous and immoral. I'm intending to look at those assertions in some detail in a further post, although frankly trying to looking clearly at German New Medicine is like wrestling wet custard.

However, the more I thought about it the more it raised fundamental issues for me.  Some were around how delusional beliefs come about and why they are so prevalent.  It also raised an ethical dilemma: should those who hold dangerous delusional beliefs be regarded as victims or perpetrators? And why does society have such a high tolerance for certain kinds of illogical thinking and not others?

As I tried to find an approach to this I was infuriated by the circularity of trying to argue on the basis of evidence when the belief system being promoted had no real concept of proof and no understanding of the language of scientific method.

But maybe that should not be so surprising. The very term 'science' seems to scare many people. 

The term has all kinds of associations for people, but they rarely seem to connect with an understanding of what scientific method is. So let start at the beginning – how do we know what’s true?

Is it real or is it Memorex?

Deciding what true isn’t as easy as it seems, especially when you consider that it’s almost impossible to prove what, if anything, is even real.  

Descartes  put his mind to the problem of trying to find out if there is anything at all that we can say that is undeniably true and came up with a single assertion of blinding elegance, ‘I think, therefore I am’. In the whole history of humanity’s pursuit of knowledge this may be the only assertion that is effectively undeniable and doesn’t require further proof. But is everything else just opinion?.

For an empiricist only the things we see for ourselves can be considered real, and an extreme empiricist like Hume would hold that we can’t even say much about that - you can describe a personal experience but you can’t look at the context of those experiences or place them in any relationship to each other because that isn't part of the experience.  Effectively you can’t meaningfully say anything about cause or effect, or even if what you perceive has anything to do with reality at all.

Unhappily so far the evidence is that what we experience may have only the loosest connection to an external reality. Evolution has handed us a limited set of senses and a brain that's good enough to keep us alive on the savanna with nothing but a stick. We probably just don't have the cognitive equipment to directly interact with or understand 'out there' even if it were shown to be theoretically possible to do it (or indeed that there is an 'out there').

That’s scary stuff, anyone who’s watched ‘The Matrix’ or that great philosophical treatise ‘Total Recall’ knows that the idea that you can’t trust your own senses is chilling. There’s something about the idea that what we experience isn’t real that freaks most of us out.

Luckily most of us can leave the deepest part of this to physicists and philosophers and concentrate on which brand of beer we will give our loyalty to.

If you want to know what Albert Einstein thought about reality have a look here http://www.kostic.niu.edu/Physics_and_Reality-Albert_Einstein.pdf

And if you want to know how that’s panning out try this

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

However, much as you might like to, you can’t totally wash your hands of the question.  In the world of our common experience we are often presented with conflicting arguments and explanations and we have to make a decision: which one is more true? 

Thankfully we have a method that’s proved to be very effective indeed. There’s a way we can put things to the test. It’s called ‘scientific method’.  It’s OK, don’t be frightened, there’s no maths involved.  If you want a straightforward explanation of it look at the next post Hypothesis? Just a fancy word for guess.