The theme this week is research and theory;
I didn't take the lecture in Monday because of illness. But I learned the lecture
slides by myself at home. The seminar also helped me to understand what theory
is, and what theory is not.
The meaning of theory is now clearer for me.
We could say that theory is a set of propositions use to identify the
relationship between objects. It is the sort of the way to understand the
world. If we take the question “what is a man” as an example, we will try to describe
and explain our understanding about the object, man. It means theory could be a
kind of process of thinking in our mind and we definitely construct them by ourselves.
I had a lot of confusions about the
differences between theory and some other concepts such as knowledge, hypothesis
and methods. But luckily the paper “What theory is not” solved most of my
confusions.
In the lecture, it shows that theory provide
predictions of what will happen in the future. I was confusing with this
because the hypothesis also provides the predictions. But after the seminar I
figure it out, hypothesis is just assumption. The assumption itself is not
theory unless we have explained and proved them.
About the differences between knowledge and
theory, I still remember the example of green wall in seminar. Actually, “wall
is green!” is kind of our knowledge; theory is the way of thinking why the wall
can be green.
In the group discussion in the seminar, we also
discussed about what the differences between method and theory, we agreed that theory
is why we do something, but method is how we do something. The method is how we
accomplish what you planned in theory.
Back to the selected paper; the paper
provides a better way to distinguish the differences between photorealistic computer graphics and natural
images. I think one of the theories in this paper is It gives the explanation
of why using that way to distinguish them:
Texture changes
are different between photographs and computer-generated images under same
Homomorphic filtering transformation.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI had the same difficulties as you understanding the differences between theory and other concepts. We also talked about the difference between theory and hypothesis and came to the same conclusion. But what I came to think of is that a hypothesis could be tested as true, false or irrelevant and so can a theory. Does a hypothesis become a theory when you prove them? Did you talk anything about that?
Keep up the good work!
Sofia