Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Hypotheses, Questions, and Evidence
The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no
bearing on whether it is true or not.
P.B. Medawar
Advice to a Young Scientist
The great tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis
by an ugly fact.
T.H. Huxley
Biogenesis and Abiogenesis
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to
establish a proposition … Argument is an intellectual process.
Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the
other person says.
Monty Python
The Argument Sketch
The first stages of a research program involve choice of interesting topics or problems,
and then identification of particular issues to investigate. The research is given direc-
tion by development of specific questions that the program aims to answer. These
questions are based on an understanding—an informal model, perhaps—of how
something works, or interacts, or behaves. They establish a framework for making
observations about the object being studied. This framework can be characterised as
a statement of belief about how the object behaves—in other words, a hypothesis .
Many hypotheses concern some aspect of the physical world: whether something
is occurring, whether it is possible to alter something in a predictable way, or whether
a model is able to accurately predict new events. Astronomers use nuclear physics
to predict the brightness of stars from their mass and chemical composition, for
example, while a geneticist may seek to know whether substituting one gene for
another can improve the health of a cell.
In computer science, some hypotheses are of this kind. We examine the limits
of speech recognition, ask whether Web search can be used effectively by children,
or predict how well a service will respond to increasing load. Other hypotheses are
constructive. For example, we propose new technologies and explore their limita-
tions and feasibility, or propose theorems that imply that there may be new solutions
to long-standing algorithmic problems. Regardless of field, if you wish to achieve
 
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