statement of the result of the
process by which an object has arisen for knowledge and merely indicates
the structure of the object. In discovery, invention, and research the
escape from the exceptional, from the data of early stages of
observation, is by way of an hypothesis; and every hypothesis so far as
it is tenable and workable in its form is universal. No one would waste
his time with a hypothesis which confessedly was not applicable to all
instances of the problem. An hypothesis may be again and again
abandoned, it may prove to be faulty and contradictory, but in so far as
it is an instrument of research it is assumed to be universal and to
perfect a system which has broken down at the point indicated by the
problem. Implication and more elaborated instances flow from the
structure of this hypothesis. The classical illustration which stands at
the door of modern experimental science is the hypothesis which Galileo
formed of the rate of the velocity of a falling body. He conceived that
this was in proportion to the time elapsed during the fall and then
elaborated the consequences of this hypothesis by working it into the
accepted mathematical doctrines of the physical world, until it led to
an anticipated result which would be actually secured and which would be
so characteristic an instance of a falling body that it would answer to
every other instance as he had defined them. In this fashion he defined
his inference as the anticipation of a result because this result was a
part of the world as he presented it amended by his hypothesis. It is
true that back of the specific implication of this result lay a mass of
other implications, many not even presented specifically in thought and
many others presented by symbols which generalized innumerable
instances. These implications are for the scientist more or less
implicit meanings, but they are meanings each of which may be brought
into question and tested in the same fashion if it should become an
actual problem. Many of them which would not have occurred to Galileo as
possible problems have been questioned since his day. What has remained
after this period of determined questioning of the foundations of
mathematics and the structure of the world of physical science is a
method of agreement with oneself and others, in (a) the identification
of the object of thought, in (b) the accepted values of assent and
denial called truth and falsehood, and in (c) referring to me