The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022)

This is an answer to the question Mechanism of Method Employment that states "A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic."

The Law of Method Employment was formulated by William Rawleigh in 2022.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available answer to the question.

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this theory:

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	21 February 2024	The law 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 theory has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Date Assessed	Verdict	Verdict Rationale
Sciento-2022-0002	Scientonomy	28 February 2022	Accept the new law of norm employment that fixes some of the issues of the current law of method employment and makes it applicable to norms of all types.	21 February 2024	Accepted	Prior to the 2024 workshop, Hakob Barseghyan commented on the encyclopedia with his opinion that the modification should be accepted given that the formulation seemed relatively future-proof: it would not have to change even if more elements are included into our ontology. Paul Patton and Cameron Scott raised some concerns about the differences between norm employment and norm acceptance, and about the derivability of norms from agents’ mosaics, given cases in the history of science where agents accept a norm that is derivable from their mosaic but do not act accordingly (that is, they fail to employ the norm). However, it was noted that this is a separate issue from what the modification aims to do: the law of norm employment does not describe what happens to norms that are already present in the mosaic, but merely describes how norms come to be part of the mosaic. Yet, the discrepancy in the community’s accepted definitions of norm acceptance (as a subtype of theory acceptance) and norm employment was highlighted as a pertinent issue for later focus. After this clarification, there were no further issues raised, and the modification was accepted by over a two-thirds majority of voters. 14 out of 16 votes were for acceptance.

Question Answered

The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022) is an attempt to answer the following question: How do methods become employed by an epistemic agent?

See Mechanism of Method Employment for more details.

Description

This law of method employment is a corollary of Rawleigh's law of norm employment. It implies that, just like the norms of all other types, methods become employed when they are derivable from other elements of the agent's mosaic (such as other theories, other methods, and perhaps even questions). As such, the law preserves most of the content of Sebastien's third law by solving some of the issues inherent in it.

See The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022) for a more thorough exposition.

Reasons

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Questions About This Theory

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