Abstract: Many researchers who work in fields such as bioinformatics and biomathematics, will have, at some point, come across the well-known query of whether they have ‘experimentally validated’ their results. This question, which is predominantly raised by people outside the computational field, is often asked with cynicism or at best suspicion towards results obtained from computational, mathematical or statistical models and more generally theoretical reasoning applied to empirical observations in an automated fashion. We argue here that the combined use of orthogonal sets of computational and experimental methods within a scientific study can increase confidence in its findings and that the use of the term ‘experimental validation’ is a hindrance to this endeavour.