BIO 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Scarlet Kingsnake, Venomous Snake, Discovery Science

• School: St. John's University
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIO 1000
• Professor: Jai Dwivedi

Document Summary

In science, inquiry frequently involves the proposing and testing of hypotheses. A hypothesis is a tentative answer to a well-framed question. It is usually an educated postulate, based on past experience and the available data of discovery science. A scientific hypothesis makes predictions that can be tested by recording additional observations or by designing experiments. A type of logic called deduction is built into hypothesis-based science. In deductive reasoning, reasoning flows from the general to the specific. From general premises, we extrapolate to a specific result that we should expect if the premises are true. In hypothesis-based science, deduction usually takes the form of predictions about what we should expect if a particular hypothesis is correct. We test the hypothesis by performing the experiment to see whether or not the results are as predicted. Deductive logic takes the form of if . then logic. There must be some way to check the validity of the idea.