Cell : A Brief History of the Hypothesis
When one turns to basic biology, the issue is straightforward. Here, the scientist must ask whether verification or falsification is being sought. If the scientist concludes from a result that a similar result will occur, or that the data will establish a rule for how things work, then the project is inductive. If the experimental design is inductive, then the Critical Rationalist framework is inconsistent with the project that is being performed, and the hypothesis should be abandoned in favor of either a question or, if sufficient data are available, a model. We propose that building hypotheses should be abandoned in favor of posing a straightforward question of a system and then receiving an answer, using that answer to model reality, and then testing the reproducibility and predictive power of the model, modifying it as necessary.
(They deal seriously with Hume, too, which I think is pretty awesome. Cell subscription required. The authors are from Novartis and the Harvard Dep’t of Philosophy.)
