This seems a bit of a rant to me. You seem to have a pretty narrow concept of “test” in mind; claims can be “tested” via almost any connection they make with other claims that connect etc. to things we see. This is what intellectual exploration looks like. Wait a half-century if you want to see the winning claim defenses all neatly laid out in hypothesis-test format.
I didn’t intend to imply that a hypothesis couldn’t be tested by its connections to established theories, but looking at my post now, it does sound a bit like I would. I edited it to make this clearer—see what is now the second-to-last paragraph.
This seems a bit of a rant to me. You seem to have a pretty narrow concept of “test” in mind; claims can be “tested” via almost any connection they make with other claims that connect etc. to things we see. This is what intellectual exploration looks like. Wait a half-century if you want to see the winning claim defenses all neatly laid out in hypothesis-test format.
I didn’t intend to imply that a hypothesis couldn’t be tested by its connections to established theories, but looking at my post now, it does sound a bit like I would. I edited it to make this clearer—see what is now the second-to-last paragraph.