Nicole Rust on Nostr: Words for early stages of ‘theories’? That word theory gets thrown around a lot. ...

Words for early stages of ‘theories’?

That word theory gets thrown around a lot. Some of my colleagues hold it to a really high bar whereas others use it pretty interchangably with hypothesis testing.

There’s an early phase of research that I’m not sure how to label. It’s not so much about levels, but something else. Here’s an example: what would you call the contribution of Copernicus to planetary motion. Ptolomy had these elaborate descriptions of everything revolving around the earth as cycles and epicycles to make up for wonky trajectories, and Copernicus came along and demonstrated that it all becomes a lot simpler if it’s all revolving around the sun. “Theories” of why the planets revolve as they do (Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s bending space time) came later.

Was Copernicus’s contribution a theory, replotting the data in a more sensible way, or something in between? Whatever it was, it was important, and it led to all that followed. But what do we call it?

#science #philosophy