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Imagination vs Hypothesis - What's the difference?

imagination | hypothesis |

As nouns the difference between imagination and hypothesis

is that imagination is imagination (image-making power of the mind) while hypothesis is (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.

imagination

English

Noun

(en noun)
  • The image-making power of the mind; the act of creating or reproducing ideally an object not previously perceived; the ability to create such images.
  • Imagination is one of the most advanced human faculties.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1913, author=
  • , title=Lord Stranleigh Abroad , chapter=5 citation , passage=She removed Stranleigh’s coat with a dexterity that aroused his imagination .}}
  • Particularly, construction of false images; fantasizing.
  • You think someone's been following you? That's just your imagination .
  • Creativity; resourcefulness.
  • His imagination makes him a valuable team member.
  • A mental image formed by the action of the imagination as a faculty; a conception; a notion; an imagining; something imagined.
  • * 1597 , Francis Bacon, "Of Youth and Age", Essays :
  • And yet the invention of young men, is more lively than that of old; and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely.

    Synonyms

    * (the representative power) creativity, fancy, imaginativeness, invention, inventiveness

    hypothesis

    Noun

    (hypotheses)
  • (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:
  • 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.
  • (general) An assumption taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation.
  • (grammar) The antecedent of a conditional statement.
  • Synonyms

    * supposition * theory * thesis * educated guess * guess * See also

    Derived terms

    * hypothesize * hypothetic * hypothetical * hypothetically