Purposefully “vague” or “inconclusive” language like the following examples are frequently used in studies:
“Our study indicates that”
“The findings suggest”
“We postulate to…”
“may stop germs”
Why is this? Is it simply because they literally can’t conclude anything 100%? I read the following quote on a different thread, and perhaps this could somehow lead me to an answer, ” Science cannot prove; it can only disprove”?
Many thanks!
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Yes, you can not conclude anything with absolute certainty which is why they use the vauge language. It could be that their data is wrong somehow, especially if you only look at a single paper. A lot of the time they will actually provide probabilities but this does again assume that they have done everything correct. It is not uncommon for papers to include errors which would give the wrong result.
And while it is true that science can not prove anything, only disprove it, this does not give an accurate image of what is actually going on. If you come up with a scientific theory then by definition there should be a way of disproving that theory. Any theory which can not be disproven is not considered scientific. So you end up with a number of theories which can not all be true which you can test. If you are able to disprove most of them and are only left with one theory you still do not know if that theory is correct or if you just failed to come up with the actual correct theory. In addition to this you do not know for sure if the experiments you have come up with to disprove the theories have actually come up with the correct result or if you performed them wrong or you by chance got the wrong result. So while we can not explicitly prove a theory we can show with quite high confidence that all other possible theories we can come up with are wrong.
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