Fail to reject the null hypothesis rather than Accept the null hypothesis? - Answers

This is the way experimenters and statisticians phrase it, but it's more than a word choice distinction. The null hypothesis is a negative and can not, by definition, be proved. To test the hypothesis, "A cat runs through my yard at night," we could set up various cat catchers, movement measuring devices, measure the amount of cat food in various locations on the lawn. If we don't find any evidence, we can say, "There's no proof that a cat ran through my yard for however long the experiment lasted." What we do is accept the null hypothesis, "No cat runs through my yard at night." We don't have proof that one didn't because you can't get proof of a negative, but, in the absence of proof that one did, we do not reject the null hypothesis of "No cat."