What is the difference between speculation and theory

Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Show Summary Details. Subscriber Login Email Address. Password Please enter your Password. Library Card Please enter your library card number. Contents Go to page:. View: no detail some detail full detail. Next "Reeking" vs. What does theory mean? There are other uses of the word theory as well. What does hypothesis mean? How to use each Although theory in terms of science is used to express something based on extensive research and experimentation, typically in everyday life, theory is used more casually to express an educated guess.

For example: Her opinion is just a theory , of course. Her opinion is just a hypothesis , of course. For example: His hypothesis for the class science project is that this brand of plant food is better than the rest for helping grass grow.

After testing his hypothesis , he developed a new theory based on the experiment results: plant food B is actually more effective than plant food A in helping grass grow. You may think you all know this, and I'm sure you all do. But this happens way to often, just refreshing everyone. Anyone and everyone Want to know even more about how to present a valid and engaging argument?

Not only did I write my Psych papers in this format, all of my Art History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies papers were written in this format. When someone says, "I believe Rey is Palpatine' granddaughter because her saber fighting style matches the same forward thrust as that of Palpatine", what do we consider that? If we are being specific to your example But since it's a ridiculous claim, it would be debunked and merely labelled as a speculation as it has nothing to support it.

And after that nothing. On the bright side, at least now there are more loopholes with which to defend Star Wars's realism!

I had a theory that the gravitation of refraction, being subsidiary to atmospheric compensation, the refrangibility of the earth's surface would emphasize this effect in regions where great mountain ranges occur, and possibly so even-handed impact the odic and idyllic forces together, the one upon the other, as to prevent the moon from rising higher than 12, feet above sea-level.

This daring theory had been received with frantic scorn by some of my fellow-scientists, and with an eager silence by others. Synthetic organic chemists are often in the business of generating new, useful compounds.

In doing so, they often exploit naturally occurring compounds with interesting properties the antitumour properties of Yew trees, for instance. They seek to isolate the reactive aspects via complex laboratory techniques.

That there are natural compounds and the capacities of their technological apparatus afford a rich epistemic strategy, and raises challenges related to identifying natural compounds, the expense of the apparatus, and the complexity of both the compounds and the techniques.

By contrast, some particle physicists hunt for as-yet unobserved particles posited in otherwise well-confirmed physical theory. Because such posits can only be detected in artificial high-energy contexts, often vast particle accelerators are required, as well as sophisticated statistical techniques to infer whether the particles actually occurred in the collisions. Precise physical theories, in combination with experimental and statistical know-how afford the experimenters, while the intractability of the posits themselves and sheer expense raise challenges.

In different epistemic situations, scientists leverage different epistemic, technical, and socio-economic powers towards their goals. Scientists in different epistemic situations often adopt different standards for non-speculative hypotheses: sometimes statistical significance is required for publication, sometimes low-N results are tolerated, and so on.

Similarly, different speculative strategies will be more appropriate in different situations. Compared to non-speculative contexts, there are significantly fewer explicit, formalized standards for speculation.

This is a shame. If speculation in its varied forms is so important for science, then this should be reflected in how it is practiced, taught, and institutionally structured. If speculation might be misread or misused, we should develop ways of insulating it from such misreading. If speculation breaks accepted scientific standards, we should develop parallel standards.

If speculation sometimes only reflects our preconceptions, we should develop strategies to combat this. Concrete proposals are far beyond my remit here, but my hunch is that many scientists already, more-or-less tacitly, have answers to many of these challenges. The trick is to identify them, and further identify features of their epistemic situations which make them appropriate and successful. Although a determined defender might well accommodate such objections, that discussion motivated a closer look at scientific appeals to speculation.

We saw that scientists appeal to speculation in both derogatory and justificatory ways, and that particularly in the latter these appeal to the varieties of functions speculation might play, functions which are often decoupled from evidential support.

I then introduced a function-first account of speculation, arguing that this better situates us to understand the various kinds of productivity speculative hypotheses generate. We further saw how evidential support sometimes does matter, and sometimes does not, for a speculation to fulfil its function well. This led to a quick sketch of how to determine the legitimacy of a piece of speculation: we should both attend to epistemic function and to epistemic situation. Beyond the task of identifying just what a speculative hypothesis is, there is much work to do in analyzing speculative strategies within science and figuring out how to make scientific culture amenable to them.

Achinstein does call idealizations speculations, but truth-irrelevant speculations. Later, Achinstein further develops this account in accordance with his theory of evidence, but this simpler account is suitable for our purposes.

This idea has echoes in more recent consideration of creativity and the generation of ideas, which are often explored using computational tools. For other instances of scaffolding metaphors applied to science see Wimsatt , Currie Achinstein, P. Speculation: within and about science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Book Google Scholar. Agarwal, S. Detecting hedge cues and their scope in biomedical text with conditional random fields. Journal of biomedical informatics, 43 6 , — Article Google Scholar.

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