---
title: "Bold hypothesis"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:16.007133+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Is boldness always a good thing in scientific hypothesizing? How we assess the degree of boldness may just be a subjective matter (it may depends on how you care to look at it).
Some new ideas, although they are rather modest in themselves, can make a very large difference to the advancement of scientific research.
At a more concrete level, the degree of "boldness" could refer (i) to the content of the hypothesis (considered relative to other possible hypotheses), or (ii) to the manner or context in which the hypothesis is presented, (iii) to its expected importance for research, or (iv) to the attitude involved. The degree of boldness could be downplayed for the sake of credibility or compatibility with established ideas, or it could be exaggerated to create the image of a "big scientific breakthrough" (to obtain research funding).
The timing of the evaluation of a hypothesis is also important: a hypothesis which does not seem "bold" right now, could be judged "very bold" later, when historians know much more about the full impact it turned out to have (and vice versa). Alan F. Chalmers comments that “What rates as a bold conjecture at one stage in the history of science may no longer be bold at some later stage.” Scientists may not know in advance exactly how bold a hypothesis actually is, even if they know it is a very new idea. The degree of "boldness" of a new hypothesis may be admitted only in the light of a rational reconstruction of the history of a science. A truth discovered at the margins of society may later go mainstream, and eventually become accepted by most people, although that was not foreseen when the discovery was made. Inversely, a hypothesis which seemed really bold at the time it was first mooted, can later appear to have been "not such a big deal".
A fashionable scientist with a lot of sponsors might be presented as doing new and bold things, while in reality it was more hype than substance.
So it remains somewhat fuzzy what kinds of criteria or relativizations we might use, to credit new hypotheses as "bold" or not. There could be an element of propaganda in the "boldness" attributed to a scientific idea.

=== Testability issue ===
In Popper's philosophy of science, scientific statements are always provisional, they have limits of application, and they could always be wrong. If a statement cannot even in principle be proved wrong, it cannot be a scientific statement. Thus, in Popper's eyes, the falsifiability criterion clearly demarcates "science" from "non-science". 
This Popperian idea has been very controversial, however. The reason is that it can be quite difficult to test scientifically how true a particular idea is. Even if scientists do want to test an idea, they may not know yet how exactly to test it conclusively. Yet, scientists also don't want to abandon a hunch that seems useful, simply because they don't know how to verify it yet. This point is especially important for "bold" new hypotheses, because the very "boldness" of the new hypothesis could mean that it would take a lot of work before adequate tests could be designed and carried out.
Some philosophers have argued that, in the real world, scientists operate routinely with at least some metaphysical beliefs for which they have no proof or verification whatsoever. In fact, in The logic of scientific discovery, Karl Popper admits that this is the case:

“I do not… go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science. (…) looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical’.”
Nevertheless Popper considered it his task to formulate a logical model of the method of empirical science, in which psychological factors or speculative/metaphysical thought play no role.
According to Paul Feyerabend, the creative processes that lead to a scientific discovery are usually quite reasonable and non-arbitrary. However, the creative processes are by no means fully "rational", and they can be quite unique. Therefore, he argued, the idea that there is one standard model which can define the rationality of all scientific methods should be rejected. This contrasts with Karl Popper's view that "Just as chess might be defined by the rules proper to it, so empirical science may be defined by means of its methodological rules".

=== Falsifiability issue ===
The philosopher Imre Lakatos argued (against Karl Popper's interpretation) that scientists do not aim to test bold hypotheses in order to falsify them; instead, scientists aim mainly to confirm hypotheses. 