Notes
1. The New York Times, April 2, 2011, Technology, p. B1
2. Merriam-Webster online dictionary; visit http://www.merriam-webster.com/dic- tionary/hacker.
3. While hypotheses, theories, and laws are sometimes distinguished on quantitative grounds—theories and laws are said to have more experimental support than hypotheses, or to be more mathematical—the boundaries between them are flexible (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms) and imprecise.
Because all three are conjectural, falsifiable, and provisional, I won’t try to make any distinctions among them. The book is about the scientific hypothesis, not the hypothesis of formal logic, which refers to the antecedent of a proposition (e.g., in the argument, “If P, then Q,” P is the antecedent, the hypothesis, or the premise and Q is the consequent). Finally, a peculiarity of colloquial American English is that “hypothetical,” which should suggest only that the statement is not indisputably true, can imply that a statement is so doubtful as to be—in fact probably is—false. “Hypothetically” in this sense, often accompanied by hand gestures, “air quotes,” suggests “Sure, maybe it could be that way, but it isn’t.” That is not what I mean.4. Oxford Dictionary online; visit http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/ american_english/scientific-method.
5. Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis (originally New York: Walter Scott; reprinted CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 2013), Preface.
6. Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science (New York: Oxford University Press; 2012), p. 77: “the hypothesis is supposed to be the starting point for all experiments.”
7. For example, the nineteenth-century physicist and positivist philosopher Ernst Mach did not accept the existence of atoms as actual entities, but he did allow that the atomic hypothesis was useful because it made certain calculations possible; see Laurens Laudan, Science and Hypothesis (Dordrecht: D.
Eridel; 1981), chapter 13. In earlier ages, the Catholic Church had had no problems with Galileo’s description of a heliocentric solar system as long as he acknowledged that the idea of the sun being at the center of the solar system was merely a hypothesis, a useful tool for simplifying astronomical calculations. When Galileo asserted that his model accurately described reality, the Church’s patience came to an end and he was forced to recant the idea.8. Representative sources that confound hypothesis and prediction: https:// answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070922185430AAFFd6G; http://www. differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-hypothesis-and-prediction/; http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-hypothesis-and-prediction; http://madaboutscience.weebly.com/prediction-vs-hypothesis.html;
9. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) discusses the hypothesis as a conjecture about unobservables.
10. The Logical Positivist philosophers (see, e.g., A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic [New York: Dover Publications; 1946]), argued that verifiability was the main criterion for a genuine statement of fact (i.e., a hypothesis). Verifiability implies the ability to make observations that would show the statement was either true or false. Ayer admitted that, while conclusive verifiability was not attainable (i.e., that the truth of a hypothesis could not be proved absolutely), we could achieve verifiability in principle if the appropriate experiments or observations were conceivable or if the truth of a statement could be made probable (weak verifiability), rather than certain.
11. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Routledge Classics; 2002). Popper rejected the concept of verifiability because hypotheses could never be conclusively shown to be True. Hypotheses could be found to be false, however, and science could advance by rigorously testing and rejecting the bad ones.
Popper's ideas are considered in detail in Chapter 3.12. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Advice to a Young Investigator. Translated by N. Swanson and L. Swanson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1999).
13. A few theoretical physicists, such as David Deutsch, are proposing theories that go beyond empiricism, and I'll touch on his ideas in Chapter 10.
14. pH of acid rain: http://www.epa.gov/acidrain/education/site_students/phscale.html
15. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, “Early Explorations of the Visual Cortex,” Neuron 20:401-412,1998.
16. Not all scientists admire Popper, and I'll review the work ofthree critics in Chapter 10.
17. John R. Platt, “Strong Inference,” Science 146:347-353, 1964. Platt's Strong Inference is unrelated to the probabilistic sort of inferential reasoning called “strong inference” that was discussed in Chapter 1.
18. Malachi H. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
19. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgensteins Poker (New York: HarperCollins; 2 001).
20. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2003). Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science whose lucid descriptions of Popper's work I will rely on throughout this chapter.
21. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Routledge, 2002).
22. See David Wooton, The Invention of Science (New York: Harper Perennial; 2015), chapter 6, for a discussion of the Renaissance invention of the concept of a fact as a “peculiar blend of reality and thought” that distinguishes modern from ancient science.
23. Justificationism. The school of Logical Positivism (see Note 10) distinguished the “context of justification” (i.e., the aspect of scientific thinking that involved public and hence, philosophically accessible, aspects in the conduct of science; (e.g., Okasha, Philosophy of Science, Note 24, p. 79) from the “context of discovery,” which included those aspects of thinking that were entirely internal and hidden, even from the thinker (i.e., the psychological parts).
Logical Positivists thought that it was important to be able to justify scientific beliefs. Thus, even the weak form of probable verifiability or justification still depends on the validity of inductive reasoning for its truth value. See D. Miller, Critical Rationalism, Note 33, for a comprehensive discussion of justificationism and Popper's views.24. Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2002). I do not believe that Okasha accurately represents Popper's thought.
25. What is induction? See discussion in Chapter 1.
26. Popper, Logic.
27. The philosopher and statistician Deborah G. Mayo, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press; 2018), faults Popper for not defining “severe” and proposes that a severe test is one that would “probably” have detected a flaw in the hypothesis had it existed. She describes in technical detail how statistical tests fail the severity criterion. Mayo goes considerably beyond what Popper would have endorsed, however, arguing that, if a hypothesis does pass a severe test, its passing counts as evidence in favor of the hypothesis, contrary to what Popper believed, as I'll show.
28. All hypotheses, observations, and, in fact, scientific reasoning of many kinds are said to be “theory laden”; that is, they are shaped by our prior understanding and assumptions about the world; for example, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Theory-ladenness.
29. Okasha, Philosophy of Science.
30. Godfrey-Smith, Theory, chapter 4.
31. The analogy between the automotive problem and science breaks down because Bob could eventually get all relevant information regarding the car battery and manipulate all the variables directly; scientists rarely have access to all the variables or the ability to manipulate them. The point here is that Bob's strategy in testing and eliminating alternatives is analogous to the kinds of reasoning from hypotheses that scientists use.
32. Howard Camping tribute https://www.christianpost.com/news/tribute-to-harold- camping-on-family- radio-network-leaves-out-any-mention-of-his-end-times- prophecies.html, Christian Post, 2011; Howard Camping, Wikipedia.org https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Camping, Howard Camping Dies, Huffington post https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harold-camping-dead-dies_n_4459716. Over the years, Camping's organization, Family Radio, amassed hundreds of millions of dollars, many from donors, and was notably successful with the campaign associated with his March 11, 2011, end- of- the- world prediction. When that didn't happen, Camping saw that his attempts at forecasting were “incorrect and sinful” and stopped trying.
33. Popper, Logic, p. 17; “the system that represents our world of experience... has been submitted to tests and has stood up to tests.”
34. David Miller, Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defense. (Peru, IL: Open Court; 1994). Miller is a critical rationalist philosopher who, in his “restatement” of Popper's positions, presents an in-depth critique rebuttal of many of Popper's critics, as well as an accessible explication of Popper's own ideas. Miller's book was a major resource for my discussion of Popper.
35. “Degrees of corroboration” This is one of the gaps in Popper's program that Mayo (see Note 27) seeks to fill, seeing passing a severe test as positive evidence in favor of a hypothesis.
36. Platt, ibid. Again, Platt's program is primarily hypothetico-deductive, as Popper's is, not inductive.
37. Number of citations for Platt's article from Google Scholar search (May 31, 2018).
38. T. C. Chamberlin, “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses: With This Method the Dangers of Parental Affection for a Favorite Theory Can Be Circumvented,” Journal of Geology 1897 (reprinted in Science 148:754-759, 1965.)
39. Crucial experiment. Francis Bacon emphasized the concept, but some thinkers, for example. Pierre Duhem, “Physical Theory and Experiment, in Sandra G.
Harding (Ed.), Can Theories Be Refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine Thesis (Boston: D. Reidel; 1976), deny that any such thing exists. Again, science does what it can. Perhaps we can say that some experiments are more crucial than others.40. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic. See Note 10.
41. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction.
42. Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, Revised ed. (New York: The New American Library, 1959).
43. Richard Feynman, The Very Best of the Feynman Lectures (New York: Basic Books; 1961), audio CD.
44. Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (New York: Cambridge University Press; 1979); Isaac Newton's first rule—“No more causes are to be admitted than those which are both true and sufficient to explain the appearances.” Similarly, A. Comte's “Law One” (cited by Laudan, Science, p. 154) was “the rule that we should in all cases form the simplest hypothesis consistent with the whole of the facts to be presented.” Or “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Dubiously attributed to Albert Einstein (math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/general/ occam.html).
45. Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.
46. Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe (New York: HarperCollins; 2011).
47. “Not for nothing do we call the laws of nature ‘laws': the more they prohibit, the more they say.” Popper, Logic, p. 19.
48. Paul Fatt and Bernard Katz, “Spontaneous Subthreshold Activity at Motor Nerve Endings,” Journal of Physiology (London) 117:109-128, 1952. Fatt and Katz studied the chemical synapses between nerve and muscle cells, but the principles they found apply to all synapses, such as those between nerve cells in the brain.
49. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster; 1945).
50. Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.
51. Ramon y Cajal, Advice, p. 117.
52. Mayo, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing.
53. Bryan Magee, Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper (La Salle, IL: Open Court; 1994), p. 30.
54. Alfonso Araque, Vladimir Parpura, R. P. Sanzgiri, and Phillip G. Haydon, “Tripartite Synapses: Glia, the Unacknowledged Partner,” Trends in Neuroscience 22:208-215, 1999. An early review by a few of the pioneers in this field.