Now we’ve got it: we see the need to enumerate every hypothesis we can in order to test even one hypothesis properly.
A cached handle I have for this is “the negation of a hypothesis is not a hypothesis”; said another way, “the negation of a model is not a model.” Insofar as a hypothesis / model is a thing that makes predictions, “not (a thing that makes predictions)” isn’t a thing that makes predictions. E.g. “person X just didn’t understand the concept” is not a hypothesis about what’s going on when person X gets a problem wrong on a test.
A cached handle I have for this is “the negation of a hypothesis is not a hypothesis”; said another way, “the negation of a model is not a model.” Insofar as a hypothesis / model is a thing that makes predictions, “not (a thing that makes predictions)” isn’t a thing that makes predictions. E.g. “person X just didn’t understand the concept” is not a hypothesis about what’s going on when person X gets a problem wrong on a test.