MULTIPLE WORKING HYPOTHESES
Premature Theories — Explanations adopted from a sense of urgency to reinforce what is familiar or
comfortable. These rapid inferences often result from a (possibly unacknowledged) tendency to force-fit facts into existing ideas.
Ruling Theories — Explanations considered to repre- sent consensus about facts or, in some cases, subjective
opinions. This condition — even if reached through incomplete or erroneous methods — becomes resistant to change and can suppress real knowledge available from hypothesis testing.
A Family of Hypotheses (the MMWH) — A set of different possible explanations for a phenomenon or set
of observations. The “family” designation implies that, in a healthy environment, parental attention must be spread fairly among different ideas, thereby avoiding unfounded favoritism toward a single idea.
Chamberlin firmly believed that the MMWH promoted thoroughness of investigation. By having multiple hypoth- eses studied in parallel, the effects of each hypothesis on the others should tend to sharpen the overall analytical criteria and findings.
But Chamberlin acknowledged that the MMWH is chal- lenging for students to effectively learn. He also noted that, among teachers, the MMWH must compete in the world of “pedagogical uniformitarianism” where a particular teaching method might dominate a particular time period, only to be replaced by a different method in a later time period.
A Statistical View of MMWH Importance
A readily accessible and verifiable avenue for assessing how use of the MMWH might have changed over time is an online search of relevant publications using the “Advanced search” options in the Google Scholar search engine. Using the selec- tion and exclusion filters available in Google Scholar, separate searches were made using the attributes explained in Table 1.
The main interests in the search were to compare “Geology” and “Climatology” — where geology was the original focus for Chamberlin and climatology (one of Chamberlin’s research interests) has become a more recent and high-profile focus for studies of climate change. To help evaluate whether any apparent trends were meaningful, ”Psychology” was used as a control topic, given that hypothesis testing usually is not emphasized in the styles of deductive reasoning favored in psychology and the other social sciences.
Table 1 and Figure 1 show results from the Google Scholar search for evidence of any trends in published references to the MMWH. In Figure 1, the “Examples per 10,000 Papers” metric is defined as the number of publications mentioning MMWH normalized to the number of papers which mentioned “hypothesis” in some form.
Taken at face value, the statistical data suggest that the apparent frequency of references to MMWH was in decline in the geology literature from the 1970s through the early 2000s — but with a notable resurgence after 2010. In contrast, references to the MMWH in the climatology literature appar- ently increased over time and with a noticeable uptick after
Scholarly Publications which mention the Method of Multiple Hypotheses (MMWH) Subject
Geology
Time Period MMWHA 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 2010-2019 2020-2022
124 193 331 678
1,320 335
Google Scholar search phrases:
A. Subject "multiple working hypotheses" B. Subject "hypothesis"
C. Psychology "multiple working hypotheses" -geology, -climatology, -ecology D. Psychology "hypothesis" -geology, climatology, -ecology
Other search criteria: Articles (Any Type - "Review articles" not selected); include patents (de-selected); include citations (de-selected); Custom range (decadal, as noted)
www.aipg.org Oct.Nov.Dec 2022 • TPG 15 6 Climatology
HypothesisB MMWHA 18,400 32,900 78,800
251,000 315,000 19,400
30 53 84
293 99
15,600 20,000 21,600 16,800
39 39 63
Psychology
HypothesisB MMWHC 4,270 7,480
103 132 53
HypothesisD 130,000 313,000
1,110,000 1,470,000 1,400,000 56,500
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
