Mutual Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016)

This is a definition of Mutual Authority Delegation that states "Communities A and B are said to be in a relationship of mutual authority delegation iff community A delegates authority over topic x to community B, and community B delegates authority over topic y to community A."

This definition of Mutual Authority Delegation was formulated by Nicholas Overgaard and Mirka Loiselle in 2016.1

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this definition:

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	2 February 2018	The definition became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective suggested modification.	No	6 February 2023	The definition became rejected as a result of the acceptance of the respective modification.

Suggestions To Accept

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

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2016-0004	Scientonomy	7 September 2016	Provided that the notion of authority delegation is accepted, accept the notions of mutual authority delegation and one-sided authority delegation as subtypes of authority delegation.	Accepted	Following a period of discussion, it was finally agreed that "the current definitions of authority delegation, mutual authority delegation, and one-sided authority delegation, despite their problems, are currently the best available such definitions".c1 It was noted that these definitions don't take into the account the possibility of conditional authority delegation, where community A is prepared to accept the findings of another community on a certain topic only if these findings also satisfy some additional criteria imposed by community A. It was argued that there might be cases where a community's reliance on the findings of another community might be "conditional in ways that the current authority delegation definition is too restrictive to encompass".c2 The idea of conditional delegation was found pursuit-worhty.c3 It was also stressed that these definitions are only the first step towards a deeper understanding of the mechanism of authority delegation. Scientonomists were advised to pursue the idea of deducing "theorems concerning theory acceptance and method employment in delegating mosaics".c4	2 February 2018

Suggestions To Reject

These are all the modifications where the rejection of this definition has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2019-0017	Scientonomy	26 December 2019	Accept the definitions of authority delegation, and its subtypes, that generalize the currently accepted definitions to apply to all epistemic agents, rather than only communities.	Accepted	The commentators found the modification uncontroversial.c1 c2 It was noted that the modification "merely attempts to capture what is already de facto accepted - namely, the idea that authority can be delegated by and to epistemic agents of all kinds (both communal and individual)" as indicated by the "fact that the canonical examples of authority delegation often involve individual experts (see, for example, Loiselle 2017)".c3 It was agreed that the modification "introduces a necessary rewording in the definitions of authority delegation and its species".c4	6 February 2023

Question Answered

Mutual Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016) is an attempt to answer the following question: What is mutual authority delegation? How should it be defined?

See Mutual Authority Delegation for more details.

Description

Overgaard and Loiselle illustrate the relationship of mutual authority delegation by a number of examples. For one, physicists acknowledge that biologists are the experts on questions concerning life, and likewise biologists acknowledge that physicists are the experts on questions concerning physical processes. Similar relationships can be found within individual scientific disciplines. Consider, for instance, the relationship between theoretical and applied physicists, where despite the differences in their methods and overall objectives, the two communities customarily delegate authority to each other on a wide array of topics.

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