What is in scientific terms the difference between a “LAW” and a “THEORY”?
I agree with Terry W, the history of the word doesn’t matter anymore, what matters is how it is used in science today. Theory is the end result of the scientific process, something that is hard to achieve. Theories operationalize laws, laws are explanations of observable phenomena, often times in terms of the Math involved. You don’t go through the scientific method to try and prove your hypothesis correct, you go through the process to try and disprove your hypothesis. If after much quantitative work you cannot disprove your hypothesis, and if no one else can disprove your hypothesis, it will eventually become accepted as a theory. Since this is the Anthropology category, we don’t have any Laws or Theories which dominate this field other than the theory of evolution. You cannot produce a testable hypothesis that leads to a theory when dealing with humans, we use alot of models which work as tools to explain human phenomena. Posting this question under this category is rather pointless
