Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    72/284 (page 60)
    plicit assertion as to attributes and relations that has been provisionally made by the creation of that class. Every class or category is, in fact, a tentative hypothesis as to co-existences or sequences, which has to be either completely verified, or else revised or disproved, by comparison with all the other relevant facts that can be discovered. The Use of Hypothesis This brings us to the place of hypothesis in the scientific method. “An hypothesis”, states Professor Wolf, “is any tentative supposition by the aid of which we endeavour to explain facts by discovering their orderliness”. Our own experience is that, in the study of social institutions, on which alone we have any claim to speak, the hypothesis is a valuable in¬ strument—indeed, an indispensable instrument— not merely at the last but at every stage of investi¬ gation, and not least at the very beginning of the en¬ quiry. “So long as it can be put to the test, any hypo¬ thesis is better than none. Without the guidance of hypotheses we should not know what to observe, what to look for, or what experiments to make in order to discover order in nature. For observation not guided by ideas, even hypothetical ideas, is blind, just as ideas not tested by observation are empty.”1 Hypothesis is, indeed, not so much the tri¬ umphant outcome of prolonged investigation, on the point of being verified into a “law of nature”, as one