That is right, And wrong. There are explicit exploratory methods you can use to carry out research and that is very fine, but most research today is done using

That is right, And wrong. There are explicit exploratory methods you can use to carry out research and that is very fine, but most research today is done using an inference model, where you formulate a hypothesis and use data to corroborate it. That is one of the premises of big data that most people do not get: It enables you to do research explicitly exploratory again, while still being rigorous and somehow falsifiable..