Word Finder - hypothesis

definition

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.

definition

(general) An assumption taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation.

definition

(grammar) The antecedent of a conditional statement.

Their hypothesis explains so many facts.

An unproven hypothesis of the existence of things can be useful.

There is no data to accept or refute this hypothesis.

At any rate this hypothesis suggests an explanation of many hitherto inexplicable facts.

The schedule now called for hypothesis testing.

The Chemistry of the Sun (1887) is an elaborate treatise on solar spectroscopy based on the hypothesis of elemental dissociation through the intensity of solar heat.

His silent votes were all given on that hypothesis.

A detective's work consists largely in forming and testing hypothesis.

A third hypothesis is that advanced by Karl Rieder (Der Gottesfreund von Oberland, Innsbruck, 1905), who thinks that not even Merswin himself wrote any of the literature, but that his secretary and associate Nicholas of Lowen, head of the House of St John at Griinenworth, the retreat founded by Merswin for the circle, worked over all the writings which emanated from different members of the group but bore no author's names, and to glorify the founder of the house attached Merswin's name to some of them and out of his imagination created "the Friend of God from the Oberland," whom he named as the writer of the others.

Such are to be explained on the "sources hypothesis."

The degree of smoothness or consistency which is to be expected on the hypothesis of a single author will be determined by taste rather than argument.

It seems clear, however, that the hypothesis of epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey having been formed by putting together or even by working up shorter poems finds no support from analogy.

According to the hypothesis of Waldeyer and Thiersch there is perfect equilibrium between the normal epithelium and its supporting structure, the connective tissue, but with advancing age this balance is upset owing to the connective tissue gradually losing its restraining power.

As the word " interpolation " implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a congeries of independent " lays."

Herbert Spencer, again, before the decline in question set in, put forward the hypothesis that "the ability to maintain individual life and the ability to multiply vary inversely"; in other words, the strain upon the nervous system involved in the struggle for life under the conditions of modern civilization, by reacting on the reproductive powers, tends towards comparative sterility.

This line of hypothesis and demonstration is typical of the palaeogeographic methods generally - namely, that vertebrate palaeontologists, impressed by the sudden appearance of extinct forms of continental life, demand land connexion or migration tracts from common centres of origin and dispersal, while the invertebrate palaeontologist alone is able to restore ancient coast-lines and determine the extent and width of these tracts.

This hypothesis Clifford connected with the hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism.

The latter hypothesis seems more probable, upon the whole, although there is little to choose between the two.

But this hypothesis cannot be accepted as furnishing a satisfactory explanation of the likeness.

The hypothesis that Beowulf is in whole or in part a translation from a Scandinavian original, although still maintained by some scholars, introduces more difficulties than it solves, and must be dismissed as untenable.

In the motion consequent on any slight disturbance the total energy T+V is constant, and since T is essentially positive it follows that V can never exceed its equilibrium value by more than a slight amount, depending on the energy of the disturbance, This implies, on the present hypothesis, that there is an upper limit to the deviation of each co-ordinate from its equilibrium value; moreover, this limit diminishes indefinitely with the energy of the original disturbance.

This leads to a determinantal equation in X whose 2n roots are either real and negative, or complex with negative real parts, on the present hypothesis that the functions T, V, F are all essentially positive.

It is sometimes known as the "expectation of life," a term, however, which involves a mathematical hypothesis now discarded.

Stubbs's edition of the Itinerarium (Rolls Series, 1864), in which the contrary hypothesis is maintained, appeared before Gaston Paris published his discovery.

It follows that, for the thinking mind, matter is a necessary hypothesis.

It follows that philosophy is in a sense both dualist and monist; it is a cosmic dualism inasmuch as it admits the possible existence of matter as a hypothesis, though it denies the possibility of any true knowledge of it, and is hence in regard of the only possible knowledge an idealistic monism.

Both laws were of paramount importance, as direct evidence of Darwin's theory of descent, which, it will be remembered, was at the time regarded merely as an hypothesis.

In Kowalevsky's Versuch einer natiirlichen Classification der Fossilen Hufthiere (1873) we find a model union of detailed inductive study with theory and working hypothesis.

Brocchi and Daniel Rosa (1899) have developed the hypothesis of the progressive reduction of variability.

The net result of observation is not favourable to the essentially Darwinian view that the adaptive arises out of the fortuitous by selection, but is rather favourable to the hypothesis of the existence of some quite unknown intrinsic law of life which we are at present totally unable to comprehend or even conceive.

The resemblance of this to some versions of the Hindu doctrine of the four ages or yuga is hardly to be accounted for except on the hypothesis that the Mexican theology contains ideas learnt from Asiatics.

This view, generally known as "Prout's hypothesis," at least had the merit of stimulating inquiry, and many of the most careful determinations of atomic weights undertaken since its promulgation have been provoked by the desire to test its validity.

In 1902, in an "attempt at a chemical conception of the ether," he put forward the hypothesis that there are in existence two elements of smaller atomic weight than hydrogen, and that the lighter of these is a chemically inert, exceedingly mobile, all-penetrating and all-pervading gas, which constitutes the aether.

The occasional similarities of thought and expression between them and the Lucan writings suggest that the period of their origin lies within a quarter of a century after Paul's death, and, when one or two later accretions are admitted, the internal evidence, either upon the organization of the church 1 or upon the errors controverted, tallies with this hypothesis.

But Aristotle was an author as well as a lecturer; for the hypothesis that the Aristotelian writings are notes of his lectures taken down by his pupils is contradicted by the tradition of their learning while walking, and disproved by the impossibility of taking down such complicated discourses from dictation.

Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things.

Plato's hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own.

Here, too, he examined the hypothesis of Eudoxus that things are caused by mixture of forms, a hypothesis which formed a kind of transition to - his own later views, but failed to satisfy him on account of its diffi - culties.

He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.

During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works.

There is a further hypothesis that the Aristotelian works were not originally treatises, but notes of lectures either for or by his pupils.

We have seen how anxious Aristotle was to be considered one of the Platonists, how reluctant he was to depart from Plato's hypothesis of forms, and how, in denying the separability, he retained the Platonic belief in the reality and even in the unity of the universal.

The hypothesis of inherence gives an inadequate account of the dependence of an attribute on a substance, and is a kind of half-way house between separation and predication.

These considerations make it probable that the author of all three treatises was Aristotle himself; while the analysis of the treatises favours the hypothesis that he wrote the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia more or less together as the rudimentary first drafts of the mature Nicomachean Ethics.

At first he adopted the somewhat ascetic views of his master about soul and body, and about goods of body and estate; but before Plato's death he had rejected the hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the form of the good identified with the one, by which Plato tried to explain moral phenomena; while his studies and teaching on rhetoric and poetry soon began to make him take a more tolerant view than Plato did of men's passions.

The hypothesis that the Eudemian Ethics, and by consequence the Magna Moralia, are later than Aristotle has arisen from a simple misconception, continued in a Scholium attributed to Aspasius, who lived in the 2nd century A.D.

According to a probable hypothesis it is a continuation of the above-mentioned river Reka, which is lost near Sankt Kanzian.

The hypothesis (Schlatter, Das neugefundene hebrdische Stuck des Sirach) that it was from Aristobulus that the philosophy of Ecclesiasticus was derived is not generally accepted.

The structure of the Mollusca in the greater number of cases agrees with the hypothesis that the primitive form was unsegmented, and therefore had but one pair of coelomic ducts and one pair of nephridia.

The former hypothesis with its variants may be called the Trochosphere-hypothesis, the latter the Gastraea-hypothesis.