Question Acceptance

What does it mean to say that a question is accepted? How should question acceptance be defined?

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by William Rawleigh in 2018. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community. Question Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018) is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available definition of the term. Question Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018) states "A question is said to be accepted if it is taken as a legitimate topic of inquiry."

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	12 May 2018	This is when Rawleigh's The Status of Questions in the Ontology of Scientific Change that offered a definition of question acceptance was published. This is a good indication that the question of how the term is to be defined is considered legitimate by the community.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Question Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018)	A question is said to be accepted if it is taken as a legitimate topic of inquiry.	2018

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Question Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018)	1 November 2018

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

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

Current View

In Scientonomy community, the accepted definition of the term is Question Acceptance (Rawleigh-2018). It is defined as: "A question is said to be accepted if it is taken as a legitimate topic of inquiry."

Question Acceptance refers to one of the two stances that epistemic communities can take towards questions, with the opposite stance being unacceptance. A question is said to be accepted by an epistemic community if and only if said epistemic community takes the question to be a legitimate topic of inquiry. Read More

Related Topics

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

• Question
• Theory Acceptance