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The Second Law (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017) (view source)
Revision as of 21:45, 30 January 2017
, 21:45, 30 January 2017no edit summary
|Description=According to this formulation of the second law, if a theory satisfies the acceptance criteria of the method actually employed at the time, then it becomes accepted into the mosaic; if it does not, it remains unaccepted; if it is inconclusive whether the theory satisfies the method, the theory can be accepted or not accepted.
Unlike [[The Second Law (Barseghyan -2015)|the previous formulation of the second law]], the this formulation makes the causal connection between ''theory assessment outcomes'' and ''cases of theory acceptance/unacceptance'' explicit. In particular, it specifies what happens to a theory in terms of its acceptance/unacceptance when a certain assessment outcome obtains.
In addition, this new formulation is clearly ''not'' a tautology because it forbids certain logically possible scenarios, such as a theory satisfying the method of the time yet remaining unaccepted.
|Resource=Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)
|History=[[The Second Law (Barseghyan -2015)|The previous formulation of the second law]], originally proposed by Barseghyan in [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']],[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 129]] didn't specify the causal relations between ''theory assessment outcomes'' and the ''actual acceptance or non-acceptance of a theory''. All it accomplished is stating that a theory is assessed by the method employed at the time. This is a flaw, as any law of theory acceptance should specify what exactly happens to a theory in terms of its acceptance/unacceptance when an assessment outcome obtains.
As a result, it wasn't even clear whether the second law had any empirical content or whether it was a tautology. While Barseghyan held that it ''was'' a tautology,[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 129, footnote 18]] its actual status as a tautology has been questioned almost from the outset (see [[Tautological Status of the Second Law]] for details).
