| Quine believes that scientific hypothesis is guesswork, but it can be enlightened guesswork. His definition for scientific hypothesis is based on abandoning justificationism and the ideal of certainty of science. Rationalism and empiricism philosopher once held that that science could be proved in some way necessarily, so that science can be attributed to certainty. But not only are their efforts in method circular reasoning, because they all use the results of science in the process of argument, but also Hume and Godel destroyed their illusions in terms of theory. The point of view that scientific hypothesis and scientific theory must be distinguished which proposed by domestic scholars is based on justificationism and the ideal of certainty, but they confused the scientific hypothesis and our attitude of scientific hypothesis. The failure of justificationism and the disillusion of the ideal of certainty tell us that science is tentative and fallible project, the results of science are all conjecturable, and all of them are scientific hypotheses. Quine believes that scientific hypothesis can't be proved necessarily and also the test of it is not simply verification or falsification but holism. We can only temporarily confirm or refute the scientific hypothesis through whether the observation categoricals which imply from the conjunction-of a scientific hypothesis and its background and beliefs accord with the observation.There are good and bad scientific hypotheses. Quine highlighted a reasonable and enlightened scientific hypothesis should have six traits:conservative-do not conflict with existing scientific hypotheses, modesty-humdrum and not absurd, generality-have wide application range, precision-introduce measure of quantities and redefinition terms, falsifiability-the more greater sacrifice made to accept scientific hypotheses, the more refutable, and simplicity. For simplicity trait, Quine respectively, from the strategic and methodological point of view and use Darwin's theory of natural selection from the perspective of natural mechanisms and truth explain why has the scientific hypothesis which has simplicity trait is more reasonable, more likely to be correct. Moreover, Quine also discusses the relationship between these six traits.Scientific hypothesis has two important functions:explain the past and predict the future. It's the same mechanism:hypothesis-deductive method by which we use the scientific hypothesis to explain and predict and test the scientific hypothesis. At first we conceive a scientific hypothesis based on the observation about the phenomenon, and then observation categoricals will be implied from the conjunction of a scientific hypothesis and its background and beliefs. If these observation categoricals accord with the observation, we use the scientific hypothesis to explain or predict the effective, while the scientific hypothesis has withstood the test. Quine also criticized the ad hoc hypothesis; other hypotheses put forward to save the other hypothesis from refutation, hasty generalization and other unreasonable hypothesis, and proposed two preventive measures.Finally, Quine's views of scientific hypothesis were used to evaluate and analysis hypotheses which proposed in the process of discovery of Neptune and the creation of Special Relativity. |
