Will Words Win the Day: Jargon and the Pandemic

“So, how do doctors, scientists, and everyday people traverse the COVID-19 landscape, where each passing day seems to provide new information and new “theories” about our current predicament?”

As medical students, we are encouraged to avoid medical and scientific jargon in our daily interactions with patients. Complex references to vague biomedical concepts are of little use when trying to relay important information to those we are treating. Complicated jargon, thus, is inefficient, impersonal, and impractical in the normal doctor-patient setting. However, we are seeing jargon command a central place during the ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This is true in media coverage, as well as in the general interface between the medical community and the average person. Seemingly ordinary terms such as “theory,” “fact,” and “evidence” are used, abused, and misused in a manner that blurs the distinction between what is known and what is not (or cannot) be known. Similarly, other scientific terms such as “theory,” “hypothesis,” and “opinion,” which have migrated into common parlance and popular culture, are starting to adopt meanings far removed from the strict constraints they hold in science. In the taxonomy of scientific terms, for instance, “theory,” “hypothesis,” and “opinion” occupy different levels on the scientific ladder of strength.

This is a non-trivial distinction, and it highlights an important point: Unsubstantiated opinion often survives precisely because it never faces any scientific scrutiny and can, by definition, not be disproven.

An opinion is a view or notion supported by little-to-no evidence, apart from the fact that it is held by a person for a reason—or it has anecdotal reference points. An opinion’s inherent weakness is that it cannot be tested or falsified. A hypothesis, on the other hand, is, “A tentative statement about the natural world leading to deductions that can be tested. If the deductions are verified, it becomes more probable that the hypothesis is correct. If the deductions are incorrect, the original hypothesis can be abandoned or modified.” As is clear, a hypothesis is distinct from an opinion or belief about something, as a hypothesis has the ability to be accepted or rejected via the scientific method. This is a non-trivial distinction, and it highlights an important point: Unsubstantiated opinion often survives precisely because it never faces any scientific scrutiny and can, by definition, not be disproven. However, the burden of proof lies entirely with the person asserting the opinion. One cannot be expected to disprove a notion with no evidence for its truth in the same way that one cannot positively disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy.

So what exactly is a theory, and how is it different from a hypothesis or opinion? In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences set out to clarify the definition of theory, stating that a theory is, “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world which can incorporate facts, laws, inferences and tested hypotheses.” Additionally, the strength of a theory lies in its ability to be independently tested and repeatedly confirmed through experimentation or observation. There is also the ability to make falsifiable predictions about its internal consistency, as well as it needing to be found consistent across scientific disciplines.