Theme 2 - After

Reflections on Theme 2

I think I learned a bit more during this theme than the previous one, partly because the texts were a bit easier to comprehend.

The seminar was the really engaging part of this week though. We started out discussing “What Is Theory” in smaller groups. It was nice to vent your thoughts on this with others, and exchange ideas. 

Our contribution to the course wiki was:

“A theory is a coherent reasoning for explaining phenomena, until it is proven invalid by another theory. When a theory is accepted by a majority of people, it is commonly regarded as a fact.”

Which was then added upon in the general discussion afterwards. For instance we were given perspective on how theory does not need to be completely invalidated when proven wrong in a specific context. It can instead become contextualize and might still be accurate in a few contexts, but inaccurate in others. A theory also doesn't have to be replaced with a new theory when it's invalidated, sometimes new data may prove it wrong but a new theory does not necessarily need to take its place at the same time. Maybe forming a new theory on the phenomenon will take a long time. There might also be totally different theories at the same time - even drawing on the same data. The example someone in the seminar gave was how there were at least three major current theories explaining how the universe is constructed.

Earlier we discussed the difference between hypothesis and theory - which tied into how the term “theory” in common talk is actually more like an hypothesis and different from the scientific definition of theory we use in this course. Also how data relates to theory - that theory needs to be built on a foundation of some kind of data or observation. Another interesting topic was where to draw the border between an idea and a theory. The example was Copernicus who formed a theory that the planets orbited the sun instead of the earth, and if this was considered a theory at the time even though few others believed it.

I think I learned a lot during this week that will be useful to me in the future when I am writing my thesis. I want to point to the second text especially for the tips it provides in identifying what is not theory, which I will save for critically analyzing what I write in the future.