Outcome Inconclusive (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017)

This is a definition of Outcome Inconclusive that states "It is unclear whether or not the requirements of the method employed at the time are met."

This definition of Outcome Inconclusive was formulated by Nicholas Overgaard, Hakob Barseghyan and Paul Patton in 2017.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available definition of the term.

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	29 November 2017	The definition 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 definition has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Date Assessed	Verdict	Verdict Rationale
Sciento-2017-0004	Scientonomy	5 February 2017	Accept the reformulation of the second law which explicitly links theory assessment outcomes with theory acceptance/unacceptance. To that end, accept three new definitions for theory assessment outcomes (satisfied, not satisfied, and inconclusive) as well as the new ontology of theory assessment outcomes, and accept the new definition of employed method.	29 November 2017	Accepted	The new formulation of the law became accepted as a result of a communal consensus. It was noted by the commentators that the "modification provides a much improved formulation of the 2nd law".c1 It was noted that the new formulation "decouples the method from acceptance outcomes" and "is needed to avoid a contradiction for cases where assessment by the method is inconclusive, but the theory is accepted".c2 It was agreed that the new law eliminates two of the major flaws of the previous formulation. First, it clearly states the relations between different assessment outcomes and the actual theory acceptance/unacceptance. Second, it clearly forbids certain conceivable courses of events and, thus, doesn't sounds like a tautology.c3

Question Answered

Outcome Inconclusive (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017) is an attempt to answer the following question: How should the theory assessment outcome inconclusive be defined?

See Outcome Inconclusive for more details.

Description

To say that a theory's assessment by a method produced the outcome "inconclusive" is the same as to say that the community itself couldn't tell whether the requirements of the method were conclusively met.

Reasons

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Questions About This Definition

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