Week 2 - Reflection

So this weeks theme was theory. What is theory, what is it not, what does it approach as a definition? This course could leave you feeling more confused as certain subjects we discuss sometimes do not have one clear defined solution or conclusion. But I think that you could think of it as broadening your senses and your view of the world as a whole, to not be so narrow minded and more accepting of different theories and views etc.

On that note, back to the theme in question: Theory. During todays seminar we came to a good generalized conclusion about what theory is, basically it should be something we humans construct and explain why and how something is and be testable. Also a majority of researchers should acknowledge this as true. These criterias can be supplemented by predictions. Of course it does not apply to each and every single one of the theories out there in cyberspace or in the real world, some theories is simply, at this state in time, to complex to confirm with the experiments or tests available today. One example discussed for this is the big bang theory. We cannot recreate this and test it by ourselves, but nevertheless it counts as one significant theory. I do not know if I really think it should be a mandatory criteria to be acknowledged by a majority of researchers for something being defined as a theory.

A few days ago I watched this program, Vetenskapens Värld (http://www.svtplay.se/video/367509/22-10-del-2-av-3). This episode was about a linguist who traveled to the Amazon to live with the Piraha-tribe. During his years living amongst them he discovered that they talk only in present tense, this was confirmed by some engineers who built a program to identify Piraha words and their tense. Although the linguist had good pointers about this and could speak their language perfectly the majority of linguists world wide thought of this as an abomination. This was due to a generally adopted theory of that all languages are recursive. If the Piraha tribes language was not recursive I.e only was spoken in the present tense, this would challenge this general theory of languages.  

So yes, it could be a good criteria to weed out theories from hypothesis and so on. But it could also be a bad thing, eliminating potential theories or prolonging their waiting time for being acknowledged as theories.