Hm, is there a terribly important difference? I'm not in "formal natural science" so I don't know how it goes in the real world.

But I would think that if you're being honest with yourself and your results in the "observe" state, regardless of whether or not you had an existing hypothesis, you would draw the same conclusions.

I suppose if you intentionally set out to ONLY observe before hypothesizing, you might eliminate some unintended bias or something.