3 ms·

This might be idiosyncratic, but I tend to use 'hypothesis' for conjectures whose truth is an empirical question, and 'conjecture' for those where that isn't th

This might be idiosyncratic, but I tend to use 'hypothesis' for conjectures whose truth is an empirical question, and 'conjecture' for those where that isn't the case. So I'd 'hypothesize' that rigorous testing would show the FreeBSD kernel to have good SMP scalability properties up to 32 cores but perhaps not above that, while I'd 'conjecture' that a particular problem can't be solved in better than O(n log n) in the general case. The first hypothesis is one you could confirm or refute empirically, while the second conjecture is one you could prove or disprove analytically. In some parts of science 'conjecture' can also be used to give the connotation of a weaker, less grounded 'hypothesis'. This seems to be particularly used in astrophysics, where 'conjecture' sometimes means 'very speculative hypothesis'. I don't find the distinction that important, though; it's pretty rare that flipping these two terms causes a real misunderstanding.

mildtrepidation 13y ago
I'd say using them interchangeably or incorrectly contributes to people's misunderstanding of the word hypothesis, which fuels more than a few baseless arguments against scientific theory in general.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Even correct use of 'hypothesis' doesn't require any particular level of evidence, though. It's somewhat discipline-specific, but a hypothesis could be a complete guess with no real backing. It's just whatever the experiment is setting out to confirm or refute. Especially true in fields where it's cheap to run experiments, in which case the bar for a 'hypothesis' is nearly zero, amounting to just anything testable that you find interesting to design a test for. Perhaps you're thinking of the debate with creationists and similar people over the term 'theory'?
JamilD 13y ago
Those were my thoughts as well; I normally associate the word 'hypothesis' with the empirical sciences. A hypothesis might be something along the lines of "I believe I shall observe [x] when [y] happens". Justification seems tangential, because it's about corresponding some prediction to some observation. A conjecture seems more "We observe [x], but there is no way to formally justify why this happens, or if it always happens." I don't know if there's actually a distinction between these two – it's just my (perhaps naive) perspective.

mildtrepidation 13y ago

I'd say using them interchangeably or incorrectly contributes to people's misunderstanding of the word hypothesis, which fuels more than a few baseless arguments against scientific theory in general.

_delirium 13y ago
Even correct use of 'hypothesis' doesn't require any particular level of evidence, though. It's somewhat discipline-specific, but a hypothesis could be a complete guess with no real backing. It's just whatever the experiment is setting out to confirm or refute. Especially true in fields where it's cheap to run experiments, in which case the bar for a 'hypothesis' is nearly zero, amounting to just anything testable that you find interesting to design a test for. Perhaps you're thinking of the debate with creationists and similar people over the term 'theory'?

JamilD 13y ago

Those were my thoughts as well; I normally associate the word 'hypothesis' with the empirical sciences. A hypothesis might be something along the lines of "I believe I shall observe [x] when [y] happens". Justification seems tangential, because it's about corresponding some prediction to some observation. A conjecture seems more "We observe [x], but there is no way to formally justify why this happens, or if it always happens." I don't know if there's actually a distinction between these two – it's just my (perhaps naive) perspective.