One-sided Authority Delegation

What is one-sided authority delegation? How should it be defined?

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Nicholas Overgaard and Mirka Loiselle in 2016. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community. One-sided Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016) is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available definition of the term. It is defined as: "Communities A and B are said to be in a relationship of one-sided authority delegation iff community A delegates authority over topic x to community B, but community B doesn’t delegate any authority to community A."

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this term (it includes all the instances when the term was accepted as a part of a community's taxonomy):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	7 September 2016	The publication of the article by Overgaard and Loiselle titled Authority Delegation is a good indication of acceptance of the question.	Yes

All Theories

The following definitions of the term have been suggested:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
One-sided Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016)	Communities A and B are said to be in a relationship of one-sided authority delegation iff community A delegates authority over topic x to community B, but community B doesn’t delegate any authority to community A.	2016
One-sided Authority Delegation (Patton-2019)	Epistemic agents A and B are said to be in a relationship of one-sided authority delegation iff A delegates authority over question x to B, but B doesn’t delegate any authority to A.	2019

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Accepted Theories

The following definitions of the term have been accepted:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	One-sided Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016)	2 February 2018

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this term:

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
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.	Open

Current Definition

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is One-sided Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016).

One-sided Authority Delegation (Overgaard-Loiselle-2016) states: "Communities A and B are said to be in a relationship of one-sided authority delegation iff community A delegates authority over topic x to community B, but community B doesn’t delegate any authority to community A." One-sided authority delegation is a sub-type of authority delegation. It describes a situation where one community delegates authority over some topic to another community, but the other community does not delegate any authority back.

A good example of one-sided authority delegation is the relationship between contemporary philosophers and physicists. Philosophers themselves are not physicists (though, they certainly can be), meaning they must rely on the theories accepted by physicists to conduct research about, say, the quantum entities that populate the world. As soon as a physicist accepts a new particle (e.g. the Higgs boson), philosophers too will accept the existence of that particle. However, if philosophers for some reason begin to debate the ontological status of that new particle, physicists are unlikely to pay any attention to the philosophers. So, at least in principle, it is possible for one community to delegation authority to another, but for the other to delegate no authority to the first community.

Ontology

Existence

There is currently no accepted view concerning the existence of one-sided authority delegations.

Disjointness

No classes are currently accepted as being disjoint with this class.

Subtypes

No classes are currently accepted as subtypes of an one-sided authority delegation.

Supertypes

No classes are currently accepted as supertypes of an one-sided authority delegation.

Associations

No associations of an one-sided authority delegation are currently accepted.

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Dynamics

If a question concerning the dynamics of an one-sided authority delegation is missing, please add it here.