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by Scarblac
615 days ago
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Yes, it's a statement thats true or false. But it must also be useful. We don't do science just to enumerate trivial true statements, after all. To be useful it needs to predict things. And when it's falsified (say your hypothesis explained why swans are white, but you found a black one), it doesn't get discarded immediately. It's still useful until someone comes up with a better hypothesis that fits with white swans and the occasional black swan. |
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Sure it can be useful. Think of it like a mathematical theorem. What’s the point of the theorem unless it’s useful? Why would a book define a theorem if it wasn’t useful?
So theorems in math need to be useful. But such a quality is human and fuzzy in nature. What does it mean to be useful? And everyone has a different definition of useful. That’s why the definition of a theorem doesn’t include the term useful Even though generally speaking it’s a bit of a requirement if an author were to define a theorem in a book.
The definition for hypothesis that I use follows the exact same process. It is a rigorous technical definition that we are using for rigorous and detailed categorization of another term: “Theoretical computer science”.
Thus in the face of such a task I use the most rigorous definition of hypothesis available. I discard fuzzy terms like usefulness or expositions into “why” to determine categorization.
The statistical hypothesis which defines the term hypothesis in a very technical way. In fact, in statistics, hypothesis testing is basically the technical definition of the scientific method. Following this definition we can clearly see the boundaries of things more clearly.
Theoretical computer science does not involve hypothesis testing. It is mathematics because it involves axioms and theorems.