"One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it"
About this Quote
A failed hypothesis still gets to keep the receipts. Rostand, a biologist with a philosopher’s allergy to scientific vanity, is pointing at an uncomfortable truth: the clean, heroic story of science (bold idea, swift confirmation, progress!) is mostly PR. In practice, even the hypotheses that end up in the trash can are the engines that forced the field to build new tools, gather stubborn data, and sharpen concepts. The demolition is the achievement.
The intent here is corrective. Rostand is crediting the wrong winner on purpose, redistributing prestige away from the triumphant theory and toward the disciplined work of falsification. The subtext is a warning against smug empiricism and the retrospective sneer of “obviously that was wrong.” If it was so obviously wrong, why did it take so much ingenuity to prove it? His sentence quietly honors all the hidden labor science tends to hide: the calibration, the controls, the tedious replication, the new measurements invented solely because an idea wouldn’t die politely.
Context matters. Writing in a 20th-century scientific culture increasingly shaped by Popperian falsifiability, Rostand leans into the notion that refutation is not a failure but a productive constraint. A hypothesis doesn’t just predict; it organizes attention. It tells researchers what to look for, what counts as evidence, what would be decisive. Even when it collapses, it leaves behind a scaffold of methods and discoveries that would not have arrived on schedule without something sturdy to push against.
The intent here is corrective. Rostand is crediting the wrong winner on purpose, redistributing prestige away from the triumphant theory and toward the disciplined work of falsification. The subtext is a warning against smug empiricism and the retrospective sneer of “obviously that was wrong.” If it was so obviously wrong, why did it take so much ingenuity to prove it? His sentence quietly honors all the hidden labor science tends to hide: the calibration, the controls, the tedious replication, the new measurements invented solely because an idea wouldn’t die politely.
Context matters. Writing in a 20th-century scientific culture increasingly shaped by Popperian falsifiability, Rostand leans into the notion that refutation is not a failure but a productive constraint. A hypothesis doesn’t just predict; it organizes attention. It tells researchers what to look for, what counts as evidence, what would be decisive. Even when it collapses, it leaves behind a scaffold of methods and discoveries that would not have arrived on schedule without something sturdy to push against.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Jean
Add to List
