Hypothesis vs Interpretation - What's the difference?
hypothesis | interpretation |
(sciences) Used loosely, a tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem that can be tested by further observation, investigation and/or experimentation. As a scientific term of art, see the attached quotation. Compare to theory, and quotation given there.
* 2005 , Ronald H. Pine, http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/intelligent_design_or_no_model_creationism, 15 October 2005:
(general) An assumption taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation.
(grammar) The antecedent of a conditional statement.
(countable) An act of interpreting or explaining what is obscure; a translation; a version; a construction.
(countable) A sense given by an interpreter; an exposition or explanation given; meaning .
(uncountable) The power of explaining.
(countable) An artist's way of expressing his thought or embodying his conception of nature.
(countable) An act or process of applying general principles or formulae to the explanation of the results obtained in special cases.
(countable, physics) An approximation that allows aspects of a mathematical theory to be discussed in ordinary language.
(countable, logic, model theory) An assignment of a truth value to each propositional symbol of a propositional calculus.
As nouns the difference between hypothesis and interpretation
is that hypothesis is used loosely, a tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem that can be tested by further observation, investigation and/or experimentation. As a scientific term of art, see the attached quotation. Compare to theory, and quotation given there while interpretation is an act of interpreting or explaining what is obscure; a translation; a version; a construction.hypothesis
English
(wikipedia hypothesis)Noun
(hypotheses)- Far too many of us have been taught in school that a scientist, in the course of trying to figure something out, will first come up with a "hypothesis" (a guess or surmise—not necessarily even an "educated" guess). ... [But t]he word "hypothesis" should be used, in science, exclusively for a reasoned, sensible, knowledge-informed explanation for why some phenomenon exists or occurs. An hypothesis can be as yet untested; can have already been tested; may have been falsified; may have not yet been falsified, although tested; or may have been tested in a myriad of ways countless times without being falsified; and it may come to be universally accepted by the scientific community. An understanding of the word "hypothesis," as used in science, requires a grasp of the principles underlying Occam's Razor and Karl Popper's thought in regard to "falsifiability"—including the notion that any respectable scientific hypothesis must, in principle, be "capable of" being proven wrong (if it should, in fact, just happen to be wrong), but none can ever be proved to be true. One aspect of a proper understanding of the word "hypothesis," as used in science, is that only a vanishingly small percentage of hypotheses could ever potentially become a theory.
Synonyms
* supposition * theory * thesis * educated guess * guess * See alsoDerived terms
* hypothesize * hypothetic * hypothetical * hypotheticallyinterpretation
English
Noun
- the interpretation of a foreign language, of a dream, or of an enigma.
- Commentators give various interpretations of the same passage of Scripture.''