Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022)

This is a definition of Scientific Mosaic that states "A model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent."

This definition of Scientific Mosaic was formulated by William Rawleigh in 2022.1 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	21 February 2024	The definition became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective 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-2022-0001	Scientonomy	28 February 2022	Accept a new model-theoretic definition of scientific mosaic, according to which, a scientific mosaic is a model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent.	21 February 2024	Accepted	Nobody submitted opinions on this modification to the encyclopedia prior to the 2024 workshop. At the workshop, most of the discussion focused around the differences in wording between the earlier definition of scientific mosaic and the new one as formulated by Rawleigh. It was clarified that there is little difference in meaning between the definitions, but Rawleigh’s modification addressed the concern that the old language for describing a scientific mosaic was couched in terms of set theory, which Jamie Shaw pointed out would pose a problem for how we typically talk about mosaics (classifying mosaics by their number of elements is not particularly helpful for scientonomers). The new model-theoretic definition seemed more intuitive to some members of the community, even though neither definition commits to any syntactic view of theories. Some members of the community did not vote on the modification given their lack of experience with set theory, but overall the modification was accepted by over a two-thirds majority of voters. 13 out of 15 votes were to accept.

Question Answered

Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022) is an attempt to answer the following question: What is scientific mosaic? How should it be defined?

See Scientific Mosaic for more details.

Description

Rather than conceiving a scientific mosaic as a simple set-theoretic unity of epistemic elements, this definition is model-theoretic: it replaces the explicitly set-theoretic wording “set of all epistemic elements” with a semantic “model of all accepted elements”.1p. 91 The definition considers a scientific mosaic to be a model for interpreting all natural language sentences, whether those be observational, theoretical, or simply ordinary conversational sentences.

TODO: Add Rawleigh's discussion from his 2022.

Reasons

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Questions About This Definition

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