Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The terms theory, fact, and hypothesis are sometimes treated as though they had clear meanings and clear relations with one another, but their histories and uses are more complex and diverse than might be expected. The usual sense of these words places them in a relationship of increasing uncertainty. A fact is usually thought of as a described state of affairs in which the descriptions are true or highly supported. A highly corroborated or supported hypothesis is also a fact; a less well corroborated one is still a hypothesis. A hypothesis which is not supported by or corroborated by other evidence would not be a fact, but could become a fact if it came to be corroborated to a high degree of certainty by other evidence. Similarly, a theory, which is a logically connected set of hypotheses, could come to be a fact if the hypotheses in the theory were to be highly corroborated by the evidence. Even with this simple picture of the relationship between these terms, one can see a number of potential difficulties and raise a number of difficult questions. Begin with the notion of corroboration. If a fact is a highly corroborated hypothesis, this would seem to mean that there is a level that is prior to facts which supplies the evidence that goes into corroboration. If the corroborating evidence consists of other facts, one would want to know how these facts were corroborated. So it is ... log in or subscribe to read full text