Suspicion vs Hypothesis - What's the difference?
suspicion | hypothesis | Related terms |
The act of suspecting something or someone, especially of something wrong.
The condition of being suspected.
Uncertainty, doubt.
*
A trace, or slight indication.
* (Adolphus William Ward) (1837-1924)
The imagining of something without evidence.
(nonstandard, dialect) To suspect; to have suspicions.
* (Rudyard Kipling)
* 2012 , B. M. Bower, Cow-Country (page 195)
(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.
Suspicion is a related term of hypothesis.
As nouns the difference between suspicion and hypothesis
is that suspicion is the act of suspecting something or someone, especially of something wrong 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 suspicion
is (nonstandard|dialect) to suspect; to have suspicions.suspicion
English
Alternative forms
* suspition (obsolete)Noun
(en noun)- In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass.Strangers might enter the room, but they were made to feel that they were there on sufferance: they were received with distance and suspicion .
- The features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion of saturnine or sarcastic humor.
Derived terms
* suspicious * suspect * sneaking suspicionVerb
(en verb)- Mulvaney continued— "Whin I was full awake the palanquin was set down in a street, I suspicioned , for I cud hear people passin' an' talkin'. But I knew well I was far from home.
- "I've been suspicioning here was where they got their information right along," the sheriff commented, and slipped the handcuffs on the landlord.
References
* (EtymOnLine)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.