【☆09GRE作文冲刺组】afterglow3月7日作文Issue184

afterglow8513UID: 2579583

TOPIC: ISSUE184 - "It is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data."
WORDS: 720
TIME: 01:00:00
DATE: 2009-3-7 15:28:07

Is it a "grave mistake" to theorize before one has data, as the speaker claims? I agree with the speaker fundamentally in two critical aspects. For one thing, a "theory" established without data is imaginary. For another, such a theory may ran a risk of interpreting data thereafter to lend an credence to the theory than it actually does. But on the other hand, I would like to question the speaker's assumption that we are able to theorize before acquiring any data.

First, attempting to construct a theory before one has data is just a ridiculous action and will probably account to no more than someone's illusion and desires. Innumerable historical examples have proved the inappropriateness of forging a blind theory, and I only need to explore few of them to justify the speaker's rightness. Almost every person today has known that the Earth is not the center of the Cosmos, but in ancient times, those philosophers established a false theory and made those ego-driven people, from monarchs to citizenry, believed that no other planet could be the center of the Universe besides the Earth. Of course the theory just satisfied the populace but was not the truth. Similarly, the ancient alchemists believed that they could change stones or copper into gold before any experimental evidence. They held so strong belief that they even endowed their theory of making gold with theological and philosophic meanings. Time flies and demonstrates all their efforts came in vain. Actually, their theories are based on inexistent supposition. All the reasoning and conclusions without support of data will only end up with fancy and illusion.

Secondly, making theories before collecting sufficient data will probably intervene in the further research and lead to a wrong direction. The problem may especially obvious in the realm of psychological study. If experimenters are told the objective of a research ahead or if researchers have made a subjective conclusion before collection and analysis of the result, they both tend to make a choice intended to for the supposition and ignore the adverse evidence: the people being researched may choose a selection convincing the hypothesis; the researcher may collect the statistics or responds which are more likely to justifying their assumption, whether consciously or unconsciously. That is, a foretold theory may mislead participants to collect the data selectively other than objectively. Thus, a theory based on imagination while lacking sufficient data cannot be convincing.

However, allow me make a further examination of the speaker’s statement, which seems problematic in two aspects. One of them is that the topic appears to be established on the assumption that one can theorize before any data. I am hard-pressed to explore any example that a theory, without data to attract people’s attention, can be proposed at first. Someone may argue that quite a few significant scientific theories, such as Relativity, are based on imagination. Actually, the theory of relativity comes out of Einstein's attempt to balance the confliction between electromagnetic theory and Newton's classical mechanics in interpreting the movement of objects. Not given the data and theories by predecessors, such an important theory, which profoundly influences both the development of physics and people’s daily life, would not have been discovered at all. The second point I emphasize is that the speaker should not overlook the progress of establishing a theory. That is, a "theory" not been testified by data is not called as theory, but just a hypothesis. And hypotheses are very widely used in study. A scholar can propose a hypothesis before data and make some prediction, but a hypothesis will not change into a theory until the testimony in support of it by later result of experiments comes out. In this aspect, a hypothesis is just like a foreteller, helping interpreting complicated statistics and phenomena.

In conclusion, I basically agree with the speaker that it is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data. Such actions are little more than fancy and scorned by offspring. What is worse, they may pay negative impacts on further study. But meanwhile, I am suspicious of the speaker' logic because one can hardly theorize before any data, unless the "theory" is actually a hypothesis.