working hypotheses
Tentative guiding assumptions
Working hypotheses are provisional assumptions adopted to guide investigation or action.
Unlike settled conclusions, they're meant to be tested, revised, or discarded as evidence accumulates.
Scientists form working hypotheses to design experiments; detectives operate on working hypotheses about suspects.
The plural acknowledges that complex problems often require multiple tentative explanations running simultaneously: We're pursuing several working hypotheses about the cause of the outbreak.
- educated guessReasoned speculation from facts
- best guessLikeliest prediction attempted
- gut feelingInstinctive sense about something
- postulateAssumed starting point
- suppositionBelief without proof
theory · conjecture · experiment · test case · proof of concept · corollary · concepts · assumption · ideas · premise · deductive reasoning · metaphysics · trial-and-error · scientific method · provisional · rough draft · first pass · tentative
working hypothesesscientific laws
Proven universal regularities
certainties · axioms · self-evident truths · dogma · received wisdom
working, hypotheses, work, hypothesis, works, worked, worker, workers, workable