The Oxford dictionary gives the defination of hypothesis as ‘ a suggested but unproved explanation of something’ a sort of educated guess about something. Although unproven there are ways in which we can test a hypothesis and try to prove a beyoned a resonable doubt the hypothesis must be be tested by suitable obeservations or experiments.
As argued by Aidley (2001) ‘the business of testing of an hypothesis is what distinguises the scientifc method from other attempts at the acquisition of knowlegde, and hence it follows that a scientific hypothesis must be capable of being tested’. When testing a scientific hypothesis we need to define the question as an hypothesis being a general observation of an outcome, but an outcome of what? Then depending on what we are testing we have to make sure the collecting of data is correctly example; if we are testing human behaviours then we have to make sure that we get a broad cross section of test subjects. We have to take in consideration age, sex, race and cultural differances. It has to be test numerious amounts of times because as suggested by Gleitman et al (2011) ‘More broadly, scientists refuse to draw conclusions from ancedotal evidence- evidence that involves just one or two cases, has been informally collected, and is now informally reaported.
Althought even after the systemtic collecting of data and testing of stats working out mean, median or standard deviation it is hard to garrenty external validity of any experiment. It is even harder to find a means of testing a hypothesis that everybody involved can agree upon. We must also take into consideration that when scientists test theories and hypothesis, they do not try to prove them true, hypothesis can be supported by data and based upon data collected and then tested, but as agrued by Jaskson (2009) obtaining support for something does not mean it is true in all instances. Proof of a hypothesis is logicallu impossible.’ So after looking at the evidence the general concensus is no you can not prove a hypothesis.
Matthew jones
Psycholoy Bangor
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