Where Do Hypotheses Come From?

Abstract

In this chapter we turn to the question, where do we get scientific hypotheses? The way the question is phrased may be misleading. Put this way, it gives the impression that forming hypotheses is something unique to scientific activity. However, if we understand by the word “hypothesis” the perception of some pattern in phenomena, the establishment of some expectation as to what will happen next, we realize that “forming hypotheses” is something we do all the time and have been doing since birth. We are by nature hypothesis formers. At what age our practice of interpreting the world in such structured terms begins is not known, but long before we learn to talk in sentences we have already gone far beyond the raw impressions given us by our senses. We organize things coherently into such concepts as “mother,” “father,” “food,” and “doggy,” each of which implies a whole complex set of recognitions and expectations. We are not normally aware of how much of what we “see” is seen by inference and memory rather than with just our eyes. But there are occasions when this is brought home to us, as was discussed in Chapter 2, by the study of the kinds of optical illusions favored by psychologists and the puzzle pages of newspapers, by encounters with people of different cultures, by occasions where something radically unexpected happens, when, in the graphic but hackneyed phrase, “our whole world collapses about us.”