As opposed to doing nothing because of some kind of epistemological catch-22? How do you plan to start with a tested hypothesis, as opposed to an untested hypot

As opposed to doing nothing because of some kind of epistemological catch-22? How do you plan to start with a tested hypothesis, as opposed to an untested hypothesis? How did you test it before you conceived it? It's not an ideal solution but it's a practical inevitability to make some assumptions to get things moving. The best of us come back and check the assumptions as soon as they are able to quantify them and perform an empirical experiment, and as a backup we have others independently verifying people's assumptions by trying to replicate experiments and seeing if the predictions line up. Nobody has magic powers to divine truth from nothing. Science is a filter which gradually strains out the misinterpreted and the biased and the just-plain-wrong, but it still starts with subjective observation and reasoning. As does all human experience. The important part is that it moves away from that instead of stopping there.