  What is going on here? Put bluntly, Dingle is an old-fashioned empiricist and inductivist. He believes that the only way to do true science is to first collect data, then, and only then, to hypothesize on the basis of that data. Observation, then hypothesis. As he sees it, Eddington, Milne and Dirac have got it exactly backwards. They first (as he terms it) assume an hypothesis, then, and only then, go about collecting data. Except, according to his lights, the data isn’t ever collected: “to [the Aristotelians’] modern representatives it seems as though a fancy is no sooner in the head than it is on paper and sent for publication” (Dingle 1937, p. 785). Obviously Dingle is simply wrong; it never occurred to his opponents that hypotheses would not be followed immediately by attempts at deductive prediction of observational consequences. But it was enough, in Dingle’s mind, that they didn’t use induction, for them to come under blame.