Changes

|Description=Scientonomy currently accepts three distinct stances which an epistemic agent may take towards a theory: acceptance, use, and pursuit.Sarwar and Fraser [[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)]] argue that there is another important a unique and independent epistemic stance which may can be taken by epistemic agenst towards theories which the current framework precludes: , ''scientificity''. We see from the history of science that epistemic agents view some theories as scientific and some as unscientific; general relativity is currently considered scientific by the contemporary scientific community,[[CiteRef::Hartle (2006)]], while the theory of phlogiston is considered unscientific.[[CiteRef::Wisniak (2004)]] It is generally understood that there exist pseudoscientific theories, which are a subclass of unscientific theories.[[CiteRef::Hansson (2017)]] Furthermore, an agent may not definitive take a definitive the stance regarding the of scientificity of towards a theory. Consider the academic discipline of marketing, for instance; there is no consensus about the scientific status of marketing, and there are arguments for and against the claim that marketing is a scientific discipline.[[CiteRef::Brown (1996)]][[CiteRef::Anderson (1983)]]

If scientificity is a distinct epistemic stance, it must have a definition, but it is unclear how it should be precisely definedwhat a precise definition would entail. Consider the following hypothetical formulation: “a theory is said to be scientific if it is taken to deal with a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry”. This may appear to be a an intuitively plausible starting point, now that questions have been accepted into the scientonomic ontology of epistemic elements, and it might strike one as intuitive that because any scientific theory must attempt to answer a question that is also scientific question. However, this definition fails for several reasons.

First, it defers the content of the scientificity's definition to the definition of “a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry”, which itself is dependent on the concept of scientificity. This is circular, and so this definition circularity does little to clarify define the notion of scientificity. Furthermore, according to Sarwar and Fraser, "dealing with a `"legitimate topic of scientific inquiry' " may be a necessary condition for the scientificity of a theory, but it cannot be a sufficient condition. It is possible that a theory may attempt to answer scientific questions, but the answers it provides may not be considered scientific".[[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)]] Thus, resorting to the question/answer part of the scientonomic framework in this way is not sufficient for a theory to be considered scientific. Sarwar and Fraser go further and claim that "it is reasonable to suspect that any attempt to define theory scientificity in terms of its relation to questions will inevitably be problematic for the same reasons listed above... It is always possible to construct ''ad hoc'', non-scientific theories that answer a given [scientific] question. We could, for instance, answer the question of the shape of the Earth by something as nonsensical as “the Earth is donut-shaped”. If the scientificity of a theory were to be determined by the qualities of the questions being answered, then any nonsense could potentially qualify as scientific".[[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)]] The content of questions appears to be a fruitless avenue for defining scientificity. This highlights the complexity that arise arises when one attempts to concretely define scientificity concretelyare made. As suchConsequently, a definition is requiredmeeded, but it is not provided.