Principle vs Hypothesis - What's the difference?
principle | hypothesis |
A fundamental assumption.
* {{quote-web, date=2011-07-20, author=Edwin Mares, site=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, title=
, accessdate = 2012-07-15}}
A rule used to choose among solutions to a problem.
(usually, in the plural) Moral rule or aspect.
(physics) A rule or law of nature, or the basic idea on how the laws of nature are applied.
* {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author=
, title= A fundamental essence, particularly one producing a given quality.
* Gregory
(obsolete) A beginning.
* (Edmund Spenser)
A source, or origin; that from which anything proceeds; fundamental substance or energy; primordial substance; ultimate element, or cause.
* Tillotson
An original faculty or endowment.
* Stewart
To equip with principles; to establish, or fix, in certain principles; to impress with any tenet or rule of conduct.
* L'Estrange
* Locke
(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.
As nouns the difference between principle and hypothesis
is that principle is a fundamental assumption 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.As a verb principle
is to equip with principles; to establish, or fix, in certain principles; to impress with any tenet or rule of conduct.principle
English
Noun
(en noun)Propositional Functions
- Let us consider ‘my dog is asleep on the floor’ again. Frege thinks that this sentence can be analyzed in various different ways. Instead of treating it as expressing the application of __ is asleep on the floor'' to ''my dog'', we can think of it as expressing the application of the concept
''my dog is asleep on __''
to the object
''the floor''
(see Frege 1919). Frege recognizes what is now a commonplace in the logical analysis of natural language. ''We can attribute more than one logical form to a single sentence . Let us call this the principle of multiple analyses . Frege does not claim that the principle always holds, but as we shall see, modern type theory does claim this.
Sarah Glaz
Ode to Prime Numbers, volume=101, issue=4, magazine=(American Scientist) , passage=Some poems, echoing the purpose of early poetic treatises on scientific principles , attempt to elucidate the mathematical concepts that underlie prime numbers. Others play with primes’ cultural associations. Still others derive their structure from mathematical patterns involving primes.}}
- Cathartine is the bitter, purgative principle of senna.
- Doubting sad end of principle unsound.
- The soul of man is an active principle .
- those active principles whose direct and ultimate object is the communication either of enjoyment or suffering
Usage notes
Principle is always a noun ("moral rule"), but it is often confused with (principal), which can be an adjective ("most important") or a noun ("school principal"). Consult both definitions if in doubt. Incorrect usage: * He is the principle musician in the band * She worked ten years as school principle A mnemonic to avoid this confusion is "The principal'' alphabetic ''principle'' places ''A'' before ''E ".Synonyms
* (moral rule or aspect) tenetDerived terms
* agreement in principle * anthropic principle * Aufbau principle * Bernoulli's principle * correspondence principle * cosmological principle * Dilbert principle * dormitive principle * equivalence principle * extractive principle * first principles * Huygens' principle * IBM Pollyanna Principle * Le Chatelier's principle * Mach's principle * matter of principle * Matthew principle * Mitchell principle * on principle * Pareto principle * Pauli exclusion principle * Peter principle * pigeonhole principle * precautionary principle * principle of least action * principle of substitutivity * principled stance * programming principle * reciprocity principle * strong equivalence principle * superposition principle * uncertainty principle * verifiability principleVerb
- Governors should be well principled .
- Let an enthusiast be principled that he or his teacher is inspired.
External links
* *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.