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You always run the risk of it being a goose! runs I would actually argue that nearly all of science uses this mentality. Most famously, it shows up in wave/particle duality. We assume light is a w …

To answer this, we need to explore the question of why you want a null hypothesis in the first place. What does that mean? What is its purpose. A null hypothesis is typically what someone would exp …

(Edit: this answer is now split into two parts, thanks to a lengthy discussion with Rex Kerr. I made my original answer on a very specific reading of the scientific method. He had a very different r …

I think modern scientific circles regard just about anything as a conduit for pseudoscience these days. However, I don't think holism is given any special treatment. If you consider the ultra-pure-i …

From my questions I've asked on the topic, The Scientific Method is understood to be the process you describe, perhaps omitting the last step. However, not all results acquired via The Scientific Met …

Way back when I was a child, I watched Mr. Wizard on TV. He had a neat experiment to demonstrate how touch can deceive. He took a ruler, and made a cardboard slide that goes around it. At one end o …

The answer to your title question would be an unequivocal "yes." Its absolutely possible that some of our conceptions about the physical universe may be wrong. In fact, I believe that most scientist …

In science, one not only has the opportunity to repeat an experiment many times, but is expected to do so, and is expected to do so under controlled circumstances. In criminal law, an event happened …

Knowledge is typically defined with its roots in the definitions explored by the great Greek philosophers. SEP points out that the most common starting point is "Knowledge is Justified True Belief." …

There's a lot of pragmatic reasons. One overarching reality is that the older theories are better known and better understood than the new ones. If we switched to new-but-equivalent theories all the …

I think what makes your question difficult to answer is that it depends up the meanings of several words: Supernatural Evidence Witness Proof Many of these are notoriously difficult to define on t …