people, people, its cyclic. to form a hypothesis one must first have some data, and to recognize something as data, one must first have a hypothesis.
In other words i can not ask the question "What is the floopliwuply made of?" when i don't know what a floopliwuply is or that it even exists.
A hypothesis is an idea. It requires no data. It requires only a direction in which one might look for data.
My hypothesis is that the floopliwuply is a random string- not a word. I can collect data on meanings of words and random strings now.