Do scientists using the word "theory" loosely extend confusion on its exact, scientific meaning within the non-scientific public?

If I’m understanding your question correctly, yes, I think bandying about the colloquial use of “theory” clouds the scientific meaning of the word. And I find that in debates about evolution vs. creationism, having to stop to explain to people that they are misusing the word “theory” gets tedious. The scientists should probably use “hypothesis” instead.

My theory is that scientists have really big imaginations. Probably wanted to be superheroes when they were younger :)

On a more serious note, I agree that they use the word really loosely when discussing things they don’t completely understand. I don’t think we should have to learn any theories in school since they’ve not been proven to be true! We should only have to learn things in science class that are considered “laws” like Newton’s Laws of Motion, because these are things that are actually known.

I think science should coin a new term. Theories are based around explanations of behavior/observations, so the new term should reflect that. Call it an “Explinator” or something like that—use a neologism so people can’t get confused with prior meanings.

Most of the non-scientific public are clueless when it comes to theories vs. hypotheses.

I like this in theory (heh, get it?) but the problem I can see is that it would be hard to create a distinct threshold between a theory (strict sense) and a theory (colloquial sense). So if we did come up with some neologism like @gorillapaws recommends, we would also have to come up with some hard and fast guidelines for when something stops being a theory and ascends into becoming a Theory. And that is an epistemological question with, I suspect, no easy answer.

@davidbetterman Ha! Actually, Newton’s “Laws” of motion are still vry useful but have been proven to be inacurate by Relativity. Even Laws are not scacrosant. They are simply reductinonist explanations that have withstood a great deal of testing and been shown to be useful tools within a specifically defined context.

Take Newtonian physics from the context the motion of massive objects, which it was intended to explain, and try to apply it to the motion of very small objects like electrons and protons, and the Law is an absurdity. It is useless in that context. School would be dead easy if all we had to learn was laws proven true. THere would be nothing whatsoever to learn. Of course, such a school would be quite useless too.

@nikipedia Perhaps so, but we do have at least a quasi-epistemological syestem for acheiving the status of a Law of science. Maybe it would be well to do the same with Theories, and to use public ridicule to enforce the law (heh, get it?).

All knowledge is theoretical. Some theories have more evidence to support them than others. The evidence for evolution is far more compelling than the evidence for God. (Not hard to do since there is no reproduceable evidence for God that I’ve ever heard of.)

It’s not completely accurate to say that life evolved “up” from single-celled organisms through more complex organisms. Let’s say (as Steven Jay Gould might have said—and did say in other ways) that life evolved “outward” from basic single-celled organisms (in addition to “more” single-celled organisms, which are still the most prevalent and successful organisms on the planet) into more and more forms of life.

I don’t know when scientific theory passes to scientific “law” or any form of certainty, but that kind of misconception also restrains its acceptance. Thinking, for example, that humans are on “top” of some kind of evolutionary “ladder” (as some early proponents of the theory used to believe, and many lay people still do believe) hinders understanding, even if it lets some people “accept” the theory because “at least that way, humans are still ‘on top’”.

We’re at the end of a branch on a bush, and there’s no certainty that this branch can grow any longer… or even remain as part of the bush. It might die off, as many other branches have.

@CyanoticWasp Thanks for calling more artrention to the wording. I did not mean to imply any single ladder, and was careful to point out that there are actually numerous trees instead, each with many branches leading to some common ancient acnestor of the life rerpresented on that particular tree. I meant up only as relates to complexity. As humanity with it’s inventiveness tinkers with weapons of mass destruction so horrific they may someday backfire and destroy all mankind and much of life, it is certainly not clear that we evolved up when it comes to respecting nature..

@CyanoticWasp scientific theory NEVER becomes law, they’re dealing with separate things. Here’s a site that lays out the differences.

Like @gorillapaws, I would like to see a completely new word replace the scientific meaning of ‘theory’.