Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [155]
Welfare encourages recipients not to work.
Religious people are more moral than those who are not.
Herbal remedies are better than pharmaceutical ones.
The book is always better than the film.
Women are more sensitive than men.
We learn from the lessons of history.
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The Evolving Thesis as Hypothesis and Conclusion in the Natural and Social Sciences
A thesis functions differently depending on the academic discipline—whether it must be stated in full at the outset, for example, and what happens to it between the beginning of the paper and the end. The differences appear largest as you move back and forth between courses in the humanities and courses in the natural and certain of the social sciences.
The natural and social sciences generally use a pair of terms, hypothesis and conclusion, for the single term thesis. Because writing in the sciences is patterned according to the scientific method, writers in disciplines such as biology and psychology must report how the original thesis (hypothesis) was tested against empirical evidence and then conclude on this basis whether or not the hypothesis was confirmed.
The gap between this way of thinking about the thesis and the concept of an evolving thesis is not as large as it may seem. The scientific method is in sync with one of the chapter’s main points—that something must happen to the thesis between the introduction and the conclusion—so that the conclusion does more than just restate what had already been claimed in the beginning.
Analogously, in a scientific paper, the hypothesis is tested against evidence, the results of which allow the writer to draw conclusions about the hypothesis’s validity. Although the hypothesis does not change (or evolve), the testing of it and subsequent interpretation of those results produce commentary on and, often, qualifications of the paper’s central claim.
In the natural and social sciences, successive reformulations of the thesis are less likely to be recorded and may not even be expressly articulated. But, as in all disciplines, the primary analytical activity in the sciences is to repeatedly reconsider the assumptions on which a conclusion is based. (See Chapter 15, Forms and Formats Across the Curriculum.)
The Hypothesis in the Natural and Social Sciences: Four Professors Speak
The following Voices from Across the Curriculum explain how a hypothesis functions in writing in their disciplines. Notice that in each case, although the hypothesis itself does not change, something does happen to it between introduction and conclusion.
Voices from Across the Curriculum
If the empirical evidence doesn’t confirm your hypothesis, you rethink your hypothesis, but it’s a complex issue. Researchers whose hypotheses are not confirmed often question their method (“if I had more subjects,” or “a better manipulation of the experimental group,” or “a better test of intelligence,” etc.) as much as their hypothesis. And that’s oft en legitimate. Part of the challenge of psychological research is its reliance on a long array of assumptions. Failure to confirm a hypothesis could mean a problem in any of that long array of assumptions. So failure to confirm your hypothesis is often difficult to interpret.
—Alan Tjeltveit, Professor of Psychology
The thesis in experimental psychology papers is the statement of the hypothesis. It is always carefully and explicitly stated in the last few sentences of the introduction. The hypothesis is usually a deductive statement such as: if color does influence mood, then an ambiguous picture printed on diff erent colors of paper should be interpreted diff erently, depending on the color of the paper. Specifically, based on the results of Jones (1997), the