A Introduction
“Sony Says PlayStation Hacker Got Personal Data” announced the headline on the front page of the New York Times (April 27, 2011).1 Let's suppose that you do not immediately get the gist of what happened and reach for your handy Webster’s New Third International Dictionary (circa 1968) to find out.
You learn that a “hacker” is “one who hacks,” “a hand implement or hooked fork for grubbing out roots,” “one who is inexperienced or unskillful in a sport,” or a “cabdriver,” but that “to hack” means “annoy or vex” or “to cut with repeated irregular blows.” You wonder which definition applies here. Would you guess that a clumsy novice video-game player had uncovered some personal data in a console after breaking into it with repeated blows of a hooked root-digging tool? Probably not. You'd keep looking until you came across the modern definition of a hacker as “a person who secretly gets access to a computer system in order to get information, cause damage, etc.,”2 which seem more sensible. The context would help; the older interpretations seem unlikely to lead to a front-page headline. In fact, the definitions in the old dictionary turn out to be useless because it predated the internet and the Computer Age and could not have included the most relevant meaning. Word meaning typically changes with time, retaining some of the original sense but stretching to cover new situations. (Hackers sometimes gain unauthorized access to computers by an unskillful, brute-force method, such as trying thousands of potential passwords.)Like “hacker,” the word “hypothesis” has undergone significant shifts in meaning over the centuries. We can trace part of the controversy surrounding the hypothesis (see the Introduction) to the outdated definitions that its critics use.3
To keep from getting bogged down in semantics later, I'll begin by going into the hypothesis and related topics in greater detail than most science courses do. I'll also go into the thinking of Karl Popper and John Platt because they've had the greatest philosophical influence on scientific thinking, which is not to say that their programs are the only ways of doing science, as I'll explain in Chapter 4. The ideas of Popper and Platt do clarify the hypothesis and its role in science, especially for those who, like me, did not get much formal exposure to these topics in our science classes.
2.
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