Question

what role do hypotheses play in scientific inquiry?

Answer 1

The biggest role. It is the idea that initially starts the investigation into the truth.

For example: if an individual hypothesizes that it will hurt if they poke themselves in the eye. They are basing this off of the evidence that when they get dust in their eye it is bothersome. Therefore, their finger, basically a big dust particle, should hurt more. They experiment by poking themselves in the idea and discover that it does indeed hurt.

Unfortunately if they wanted to submit this data they would need a control and need to run many trials with a bunch of different subjects.

A hypothesis SHOULD be based on some facts and isn't just a guess in the dark. Like a two year old does not hypothesize that play-do tastes bad as it smells fantastic, they hypothesize that, it smells great, therefore, it must taste great.