Epistemic Stances Towards Questions - Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018)

An attempt to answer the question of Epistemic Stances Towards Questions which states "The epistemic stance that can be taken by an epistemic agent towards a question is question acceptance."

Epistemic Stances Towards Questions - Acceptance was formulated by William Rawleigh in 2018.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available theory on the subject.

History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of Epistemic Stances Towards Questions - Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 November 2018	The law became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective suggested modification.	Yes

Suggestions To Accept

Here are all the modifications where the acceptance of this theory has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2018-0003	Scientonomy	12 May 2018	Accept that the epistemic stance that can be taken by an epistemic agent towards a question is question acceptance (the opposite is unacceptance), where question acceptance is defined as "a question is said to be accepted if it is taken as a legitimate topic of inquiry".	Accepted	It was noted that "the whole point of adding questions to the ontology of epistemic elements was that we can legitimately speak of a question being accepted by a certain agent at a certain time".c1 The discussion also revealed a need to distinguish "a situation where no consensus exists from a situation where a consensus exists that a question is illegitimate".c2 In other words, "just as question acceptance, theory acceptance too seems to allow for three values: (clearly) accepted; (clearly) unaccepted; no consensus".c3 Thus, a new question was suggested concerning the binary character of epistemic stances: "are all epistemic stances binary, or do they allow for more than two values?"c4	1 November 2018

Question Answered

Epistemic Stances Towards Questions - Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018) is an attempt to answer the following question: What epistemic stances can be taken towards a question?

See Epistemic Stances Towards Questions for more details.

Description

Just like theories, questions too can be accepted or unaccepted. A question can be accepted by an agent at one period at not accepted by another. Consider, for instance, the question "what is the distance to the sphere of the stars?" which was once accepted as a legitimate topic of inquiry, but is no longer accepted. Similarly, the question "what is the mechanism of evolution of species?" is accepted nowadays, but wasn't accepted in the 17th century. Thus, we can say that questions acceptance is the stance that epistemic agents take towards questions.