Individual and Communal Levels

What is the relation between the communal and the individual level? To what extent can the individual level epistemic stances tell about the communal level?

Given that the TSC concerns the social, or communal level of scientific change, how does the communal level of scientific mosaics arise out of communities of individuals? In a similar vein, it has been asked whether it is possible to reduce the communal mosaic to a function of the mosaics of individuals?

Barseghyan (2015) discusses and rejects two views that relate the individual and the social: the Elitist and Majoritist views. The Elitist view holds that the mosaic of a scientific community comes to reflect the individual scientific mosaic of prominent scientists and figureheads in the community. The Majoritist view holds that the mosaic of the community reflects the mosaic that a majority of individuals themselves hold.

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Paul Patton, Ameer Sarwar, Patrick Fraser and Calahan Janik-Jones in 2018. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community. At the moment, the question has no accepted answer in Scientonomy.

History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	25 January 2018	It was acknowledged as an open question by the Scientonomy Seminar 2018.	Yes

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Current View

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Open Questions

The following related topic(s) currently lack an accepted answer:

• Epistemic Community: What is epistemic community? How should it be defined? I.e. how is it different from non-epistemic community? The topic has no accepted answer in Scientonomy.

Related Topics

This topic is a sub-topic of Epistemic Agents.

This topic is also related to the following topic(s):

• Scope of Scientonomy - Individual and Social
• Social Agents of Scientific Change
• Epistemic Agents
• Epistemic Community

Contributors

Sinan Karamehmetoglu (19.1%), Calahan Janik-Jones (80.9%)