This interpretation of Alexander's work is alluded to in the preface of A Pattern Language which states that "each pattern may be looked upon as a hypothesis, like one of the hypotheses of science" (Alexander et al. 1977, p xv).
Unlike the presumptions in law or the hypotheses of science, presumption of consent for the use of body organs cannot afford any possibility of abandoning the presumption, reversing the decision or of retracting any action based on the decision (clearly, the deceased donor cannot raise objections).
The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures.
But in another lecture, he announced that the most pregnant hypothesis in all of science is that "all things are made of atoms".
Political and ethical philosophy in English-speaking countries in the first half of the 20th century was inhibited to some extent by the advent in the early 1930s of logical positivism, which conceived of knowledge claims on the model of the hypotheses of natural science.
The working hypothesis of embodied cognitive science is that this thesis is true either because of the significant causal or the significant physically constitutive role of the body in cognitive processing.
The same route would secure the hypotheses of the sciences, i.e., the various interpretations of the objects of the sciences would be eliminated leaving only that one justified by the theory of Forms.
Here, we might want to resort to approaches to hypothesis testing in philosophy of science that do not rely on causal inference methods.
I hold on to my hypothesis, my amateur merging of science and religion: we come from stardust, so to stardust we must return.
