Opponents of the Hypothesis

Chapter 10 reviews the writings of three prominent scientists who reject the hypothesis as the basis for scientific thinking and research. Stuart Firestein is virulently anti-hypothesis and champions Curiosity-Driven science, a free-form mode which is deliberately unstructured. David Glass’s program of Questioning and Model-Building is rigidly structured and inductivist in spirit; he rejects the hypothesis in favor of “models” that he distinguishes from hypotheses. Both Firestein and Glass accept the empiricist standard for assessing scientific truth and believe that a scientific investigation proceeds on the basis of asking testable questions. David Deutsch is a theoretical physicist whose advanced ideas are, in principle, empirically untestable and, since empirical testability is the key to scientific hypothesis testing, he also rejects the hypothesis. His program is called Conjectures and Criticism. Unlike the other two critics, Deutsch is sympathetic to the scientific thinking process that Karl Popper advanced, but feels that Popper’s program must be superseded for science to get beyond the constraints of empiricism. The chapter shows that the supposed incompatibilities of each of the alternative approaches with the hypothesis are largely based on misrepresentations or misapplications of the nature of hypothesis-based science. The counterproposals are not grounds for rejecting the hypothesis, which can in fact coexist comfortably with them.