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scientific hypothesis — English
A scientific proposition whose truth or falsity can be asserted. Therefore, a hypothesis is a scientific statement that can be “tested” and verified (declared true) or rejected (declared false). Once a hypothesis has been proven true, it is accepted as a true statement, and when it has been proven false it is rejected. It is very important that a scientific hypothesis is an empirical proposition in the sense that it can be tested (verified) by experience. If it is proven to be a true statement, it might become a scientific law which might – together with other such laws – form the tenets of a particular theory. A hypothesis must be testable; if it is not testable, it is actually a postulate, not a hypothesis. The so-called “hard sciences” such as chemistry and physics, and the so-called “soft sciences” like psychology and sociology have completely differing views of what hypotheses, laws and theories are. Although geography straddles the hard and the soft sciences, it tends to adhere to the physical scientists’ view of what a hypothesis is (this stems from the quantification period of the 1970s and 1980s), but this tendency was never universal, and it definitely is not universal now.
