Category mistakes with explanation and hypotheses

"A discussion of the nature of hypotheses in science must first clarify the meaning of the word itself. This in a sense is already to a large degree a clarification of the nature of hypotheses.

The very fact that the word needs explication is evidence that it is ambiguous. Were it not, it would be easy to define it and proceed to other problems. Sometimes an hypothesis is nothing but a statement on its way to becoming a law. At other times, the word is virtually synonymous with 'theory.' And often it is nothing more than a tentative proposal. Finally it refers, at times, to the statement that follows the 'if' in all 'if ... then ... ' forms."

(L. O. Kattsoff, Physical Science and Physical Reality, Springer, Dordrecht 1957)

Most scientists are taught a very restricted notion of "scientific method", which is itself a holdover from positivistic philosophies of the late nineteenth century. It generally involves sequences of relationships between concepts of "theory", "phenomena", "data", "explanation" and "practices". If a scientist knows (without further study) any philosophy of science at all, it will usually, nine times out of ten, be some unclear elaboration of Popper's falsificationism. This is usually a statement like "a theory is scientific just to the extent that it can be falsified by evidence". But the philosophy of science has moved on somewhat since 1959, when the English version of Popper's Logik der Forschung (1934), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, was published.¹ It has even moved on from the second most popular account with scientists, Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as if philosophers of science continued to do work on the topic.

It is very difficult to find recent discussions of these basic terms in philosophy of science. However, hypothesis and explanation have generated a lot of interest in the field, and the opposite issue for those who are not philosophy postgraduates is sorting through the chaff and noise. So, I thought I'd write something.