Terms like “theoretically” or “in theory” are over used, and often used inappropriately Most of the time, the term “hypothetically” is a more appropriate term for what they mean. For example, people say things like “I have a theory that…”, when it would be more appropriate to say “I have a hypothesis that…”
My question is, when is it *actually* appropriate to use a phrase like “in theory” or “theoretically”? Please give an example when you answer.
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Examples of using both in the same context with two different meanings:
>I have a theory predicting the 2027 governor’s election. [From this theory,] My hypothesis is that Bill Billerson will beat Jill McJillicutty by at least 10%.
Theory is a predictive or descriptive model — mathematical in many cases, but in some fields it can be like a series of definitions, procedures, a heuristic, whatever. The point is that it is used to describe some kind of phenomenon *in general*, so like you don’t have to have all the numbers known, or it may not be specific to a time or place, or something.
A hypothesis will always be based on a theory — implicit or otherwise. An implicit theory might be like if your thought process were, “I read in a book last year that people make dumb decisions in a hurry sometimes, so I’ll bet [i.e. a hypothesis from this book theory] that the guy currently running to catch the bus makes a mistake and misses it.”, but then you just simply say to your friend, “I bet that guy doesn’t catch the bus.” A prediction not based on some theory — extrapolating some prior information — is just a blind guess, like a roll of the dice. Another example:
>Theoretically [/in theory] you could determine some connection between a person’s Netflix history and their sex life. If hypothetically you find only the total amount of TV a person consumers matters in this, however, and not at all the type of content, then will you finally stop pestering me over my Rom-Com addiction?
In the first case, “theoretically” refers to a general relationship between variables: Netflix history vs sex life. (This is exactly how you would talk, by the way if you wanted to plot these as two variables, x and y, as your axes on a 2D graph.) “Hypothetically” in the second use is actually throwing a curve ball, because it’s referring not to a prediction of the aforementioned theory (as in, “My hypothesis is that sex life only correlates to total Netflix consumption and not content”), but to a “hypothetical” scenario in which some relationship like that was discovered.
This is a different meaning of “hypothetical” in English from the more science-ish usage that I was going for in the first example, and I kind of just threw that in there to tell you to not worry about being perfect about it, because I guarantee a lot of well-educated people here missed that curve ball.
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