Clear thinking and valid, consistent research skills are much needed, even in this community. The methods of logic and inference are all over the map at times.

Here's how I prefer it all to be categorized:

SPECULATION

To form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence. If you speculate about something, you make guesses about its nature or identity, or about what might happen or happened.

HYPOTHESIS

An assumption made before any research is done. It is formed so that it can be tested to see if it is true.

THEORY

A principle formed to explain the things already shown in the data. Because of the rigors of experiment and control, it is much more likely that a theory will be true vs a hypothesis.

The one major pitfall folks fall into is thinking they are forming a theory because they think they have real world data, which ends up being a photo, a quote, or a video clip. But that does not constitute data, it constitutes items of perception that lacking context or repeatability, cannot really serve to test or support theory.