The Utopian Hypothesis

Abstract

W hen Isaac Newton declares that he feigns no hypotheses because they are not “deduced from the phenomena,” he marks them as inappropriate to “experimental philosophy.” Many of his followers accentuate his criticism, labeling hypothesis a “dangerous and unscientific product of an unregulated imagination.” By wedding it to imagination— whichwas often associatedwith falsehood and insubstantiality—these criticisms strip hypothesis of its intellectual value and belie the reality that it was a vital component of scientific methods. To underscore its importance in the inductive sciences, by contrast, William Whewell declares in the nineteenth century that the hypothesis “should be close to the facts,” and that the “philosopher should be ready to resign it as soon as the facts