Talk:Hypothesis
From Academic Kids
"Hypotheses non fingo" cannot be Motte's translation I frame no hypotheses because Newton certainly framed one in book 2 and two more in book 3. Alexandre Koyre notes that the 1706 Latin version of Opticks uses the cognate confingere for the English feign. In the English version of Opticks, Newton used the English feign a number of times.
When Cotes received the General Scholium, for book 3 proposition 7, Newton instructed Cotes to alter the paragraph because
- I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity and I do not feign hypotheses.
Isaac Newton, The Principia, a New Translation by I Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Univ. of California 1999 ISBN 0-520-08817-4 pages 274-276. 169.207.86.157 00:05, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)
In today's vernacular, the translation would be I fake no hypotheses. To feign means to pretend.
- No doubt you are correct - I was guided only by what seemed to be the more common translation. Perhaps 'contrive' would be better. For the sake of consistency, perhaps you would like to make an adjustment at Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica? Banno 01:29, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I've included a paragraph on the older philosophical meaning of the word. Without understanding the distinction, one is doomed to talk nonsense about the Galileo business.
I don't claim to know what sense Newton intended. For that matter, I'm not at all sure what he meant by the damn quotation. But I strongly suspect that people are trying to read the word in the wrong sense. Dandrake 16:53, May 9, 2004 (UTC)
Hello! I'm a newb here, but I would like to point out that the popular definition that a hypothesis is an educated guess is not too clear. My science teacher uses this definition for a hypothesis:
A judgement based on reasoning that requires more than 2 observations to verify.
I would appreciate any response to this. If you can even prove that that definition is blatantly wrong, it would be really great since then I can make a fool out of that teacher!
PS: Please don't delete this! Sorry for being a newb!
- Delete a newbie posting? If anybody deleted an inoffensive posting, he/she/it would be committing an offense against Wikipedia. Nor is any apology wanted; we have a policy Wikipedia:Please don't bite the newbies. But giving advice is OK, so: please sign your Discussion-page postings with four tilde characters, like ~~~~, which produces the kind of signature you see on this and other postings (even if you haven't registered a username yet). (Oh, and you can observe this by hitting the "Show preview" button.) Now to the point. Nearly everyone would say that your teacher is trying to be too concrete. The word as used by scientists and even by philosophers is not really so specific. The comment about needing two observations is about right, most of the time, but it's not part of the definition. Sorry, though— we can't prove this. Dandrake 05:37, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)
GO ON !
A judgement based on reasoning that requires more than 2 observations to verify.
