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In its ancient usage, hypothesis referred to a summary of the plot of a classical drama. The English word hypothesis comes from the ancient Greek word ὑπόθεσις hypothesis whose literal or etymological sense is "putting or placing under" and hence in extended use has many other meanings including "supposition". [1][3][4][5] In Plato 's ...
Transformation rules. In classical logic, a hypothetical syllogism is a valid argument form, a deductive syllogism with a conditional statement for one or both of its premises. Ancient references point to the works of Theophrastus and Eudemus for the first investigation of this kind of syllogisms. [1][2]
Given the sentences My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant when one has no wife, then either: Both the sentence and its negation are false; or Strawson's approach: Both "my wife is pregnant" and "my wife is not pregnant" use a wrong presupposition (i.e. that there exists a referent which can be described with the noun phrase my wife ...
Scientific inquiry includes creating a hypothesis through inductive reasoning, testing it through experiments and statistical analysis, and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results. [1] [2] [3] Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, the underlying process is often similar.
Language and thought. The study of how language influences thought, and vice-versa, has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for ...
Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how the terms evidence and empirical are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different ...
Syntax was recognized as the focal point of language production, in which a finite set of rules can produce an infinite number of sentences. Subsequently, morphology (i.e. the study of structure and formation of words) and phonology (i.e. the study of organization of sounds in languages) were relegated in importance.
According to the positive-instance approach, an observation sentence is evidence for a universal hypothesis if the sentence describes a positive instance of this hypothesis. [41] [48] [49] For example, the observation that "this swan is white" is an instance of the universal hypothesis that "all swans are white".