ABSTRACT
A hypothesis is a testable judgment, that is to say a judgment which is contingent-upon-something-or-other. To test such a judgment one searches systematically for appearances that contradict it. The information that one gathers in this testing process may be termed evidence. Cases of genuine testing can be found in the social science literature if one looks hard enough, and presumably what has been done occasionally in the past could be done more often in the future. Nadel genuinely put his theory at risk by testing these hypotheses. For if the children had retold their stories in any of the ways forbidden by his hypotheses he would have been forced to reject his theory, either wholly or in part. So, while mental simulation of the experiment by selection of cases may be a valuable ritual from which to draw inspiration for the creation of theories, it seems often to fall rather short of the rabbity ideal for testing theories.
