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TOPIC: ISSUE184 - "It is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data."
WORDS: 660          TIME: 00:42:00          DATE: 2007-8-18 上午 10:36:02

I concede that more data we get before we theorize, high chance we may get to obtain a valid theory, however, in my view, people who claims that theorize before data is a grave mistake put far more emphasis on the data and misunderstand the parament we usually use to evaluate a theory.

To better understand this issue, it is necessary for us to get aware of the process of theorizing and the essencial cariteria to judge its validity. As a common experiences, a typical theorizing and evaluating process involves: first. obtain data from the facts, in this step, data is representative of fact since we obtain it from the facts, so it is obviously that if we get more data, it means we take more facts into consideration and the theory we conclude could be more familiar with the reality, second, we theorize based on this data. finally, we use this theory based on these data to withstand the check of new facts. from above steps, we could infer that the amount of facts are not the criteria we adopt to evalue a theory, what we rely on is , the new facts, and whether our theory could withstand the check of these new facts could be the key rule to judge the validity of a theory.

So from above analysis and our experiences, we could ferret out that data, unlike the speakers says, could not be the judging standard.

Suppose there is rare data before theorizing, is that surely mean the theory must be wrong? definitely not, to illustrate this point, we need look no further than De Broglie, Broglie first studied history for his MS degree, but immediately after his graduation, he found  physics so appealing to him  that he changed his major to theoretical physics for a doctor degree, the most amazing appoint involved that: just for 4 years, just a simple deduction inspired by his historic logic, he came to be the first one who discovered the wave-particle duality theory. Although he had little data before he theorized, Could we allege that his theory is a grave mistake? in facts, his brave imagination proved to be exactly right by facts and facilitated him win the Nobal Prize. from above analysis, we could indicate that if one get no data, surely he run a high risk of false theorizing, but whether the theory is right or not could be judged by facts, not chance to success.

On the contrary, even people get enormous data, althought the chance to get a persuasive theory is large, still, it could not be a guarantee for the validity of theory which bases on these data. Reseach of alchemy could be a typical example to illustrate this point, we know that modern chemistry, even physics, is rooted in alchemy which was treated as the eariest "science", Newton, the greatest physicist, once did lot of researches about alchemy and got lots of tips and inspirations from alchemy. why people in  that era treat alchemy as "science" which is always amount to validity? the answer may involves that alchemy is established on the expriments which could provides a myriad of data. however, even alchemist theorize after data, enormous data, did they developed any right theory? cast a look back at its histroy, we could rarely find any one because none of their theories could explain the new chemical reactions. so this example enhance the belief : data is not a key role in determining the validity of theory, facts, used to check theory, are only cariteria.

In conclusion, data, in some extent, could imply the sucessful chance of a theory, but it seems to us that people should be more flexible to treat the approach to theorize a theory according to the specific acadamic fields and situations, an adherence to the order between theorizing and data would pose detrimental facts on the science developments, besides, the utimate justice is not data, but facts.