On the currency of "theory"

Stephen Kearse, Wild Speculation Isn’t Worth Much. A ‘Theory,’ However..., NYTimes, 12.19.18:

Whatever air of authority attaches to a “theory” is a relatively recent development. Theories have circulated through mathematics, medicine and philosophy without being accorded any particular weight on their own. Charles Hutton, an 18th-century mathematician, contrasted them with application and suggested that mere theory was sometimes incomplete without practice. The 20th-century scholar John A. Scott saw theory as a ruse deployed by unlearned hacks: “They regard a theory of more importance than facts,” he wrote of some of his peers, “for if they can only spin a theory they have no need of facts.” Outside scholarship, theories had even less import. An 1893 Washington Post article, “The Man Who Thinks,” mocked a bar patron who outlined a “theory concerning astral intoxication” — the joke being not just that the man was drunk but that he was drunk enough to think a theory might convince anyone it wasn’t his doing.

At that point, though, science was still relatively disorganized and imprecise. The modern connotations of “theory” are a legacy of the industrialization and professionalism of science, with theory and practice converging in larger labs, bolder experiments, better tools. Scientists began presenting and testing theories with increasing explanatory power and empirical backing, making it possible for them to put forth more penetrating explanations of how the world worked — “generalized” explanations that Albert Einstein called “theories of principle.” Their foundations, he wrote in 1920, were “not hypothetical constituents, but empirically observed general properties of phenomena, principles from which mathematical formulae are deduced of a such a kind that they apply to every case which presents itself.” Such theories weren’t just rigorous or extensive; they explained everything.