[lutusp]

> They're doing the experiment because they already believe things are this way and they're trying to get evidence to confirm it.

That's not science, that's confirmation bias. In science, one would want to look for evidence that one's theory is false with as much vigor as a search for evidence that it's true. Science isn't law, and it's not religion.

> If they disconfirmed it, that'd be surprising.

If they falsified their theory while only seeking confirming evidence, yes, that would be surprising. This is why open-minded scientists try to avoid assuming what they should be proving (the real meaning of the expression "beg the question").

[chemunc]

I'm not trying to start an argument here, but wouldn't "assuming what they should be proving" be the same as "hypothesizing?" That's a critical point of the scientific method. You don't really design experiments that can both confirm and refute a theory. When an "open-minded" scientist attempts to perform an experiment to test theory, they aren't personally responsible for subsequent theories and experiments that could disprove their results.

[lutusp]

> wouldn't "assuming what they should be proving" be the same as "hypothesizing?"

No, the expression "assuming what you should be proving" has a special semantic meaning -- it refers to a thought process that uses its conclusion to support its investigation, or takes the preferred outcome as a given from the start, without seriously considering alternative explanations.

Hypothesizing means taking existing theory and extrapolating new untested properties, then presumably investigating whether there is any evidence for the hypothesis.

> You don't really design experiments that can both confirm and refute a theory.

On the contrary, the best experiments have the chance to either confirm or refute a hypothesis. The Michelson & Morley ether experiment is a classic of its kind -- its outcome would either confirm or refute the ether as it was imagined to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experi...

> When an "open-minded" scientist attempts to perform an experiment to test theory, they aren't personally responsible for subsequent theories and experiments that could disprove their results.

Not so. An open-minded scientist wouldn't pass up the chance to uncover any positive or negative evidence for or against his theory -- both kinds of evidence contribute to our understanding of nature. Remember the story about Bell Labs engineers Penzias and Wilson cleaning bird droppings from their microwave dish? They did that so someone else wouldn't scoop them by discovering that they had been fooling themselves about the source of the noise in their antenna (which ultimately was identified as the cosmic background radiation, now standing as evidence for the Big Bang).

http://www.aps.org/programs/outreach/history/historicsites/p...

The bottom line? Science isn't law, it's not adversarial, there aren't two competing sides, and a responsible scientist maintains an open mind with respect to evidence both for and against his theories.