In a recent post, DavidSch wrote:
Quote:I talk about observation and not assumption.
The main difference is that an observation should be made objectively; of course when I see a tree, there are always people that say: no that is a bush. I will quickly give up then, because I can spend my time better than convincing those people.
An assumption would imply that you start somewhere, without showing exactly why you start there or have no underlying metrics.
I agree that an assumption is most of the time a scientific mistake, sometimes it leads to new paths however.
google says:
Assumption - the act of taking for granted, or supposing a thing without proof;Observation - the act or the faculty of observing or taking notice; the act of seeing, or of fixing the mind upon, anything.
This is something I already had in mind to write something about.
My train of thoughts can be well described by using the example of the similarity of Voynich MS f68v3 with an illustration from Nicole d’Oresme’s
Livre du ciel et du Monde (1377) as pointed out by Ellie Velinska.
Let's start with:
Evidence.
Evidence is first of all the Voynich MS itself, but there is much more. It is also the combined set of other medieval manuscripts that have come down to us, and lots of other historic material. Evidence is mostly 'objective'. However, evidence can include subjective material, for example historic letters expressing opinions. For the above example, the evidence is the Voynich MS on the one hand, and the Oresme MS on the other hand.
Observation.
An observation is something that can be made by someone. It can be a spoken or written statement. In the above example, the observation is: "the two drawings are similar". This case is clearly subjective. Similarity is an opinion, and different people may see it differently. An observation isn't necessarily either true or false, but it may be.
Hypothesis.
The hypothesis will try to explain the observation (or more directly some evidence). Here, for example: "the drawing in the Voynich MS derives from some copy of Oresme". Many different hypotheses can be derived from a single observation. A hypothesis is more likely to be either true of false, even if we may not know which of the two it is.
Making hypotheses is not a bad thing. One simply has to remember that they have to be tested, and ideally proven. One should not start taking them for granted, or as some form of evidence. (This last point may seem obvious, but it is a surprisingly common flaw).
Assumption.
An assumption is like a hypothesis, but the word implies that this hypothesis does not derive directly from anything, except, perhaps, what one might call common sense.
An assumption in the current case could be: "the Voynich MS drawing could not have been made independently by someone, who never saw any of the Oresme (or similar) drawings".
Assumptions abound, and again, they are not a bad thing, as long as one is fully aware of them, and ready to drop them if this becomes necessary.
The problem with assumptions is that one tends to make them all the time, without being too much aware of it.
Good assumptions are the ones that are clearly stated. Even if they can still be wrong.