Theory Acceptance (Barseghyan-2018)

This is a definition of Theory Acceptance that states "A theory is said to be accepted by an epistemic agent if it is taken as the best available answer to its respective question."

This definition of Theory Acceptance was formulated by Hakob Barseghyan in 2018.1 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	1 September 2019	The definition became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective suggested 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-2018-0006	Scientonomy	8 October 2018	Accept the new ontology of epistemic elements with, theories and questions are the two basic epistemic elements where and each theory is an attempt to answer a certain question, theories can be of three types – descriptive, normative, or definitions, and methods are a subtype of normative theory.	1 September 2019	Accepted	Following a series of off-line discussions, a consensus emerged concerning this modification: it was agreed that the modification is to be accepted.c1 It was mentioned that most of the elements of this new ontology "has already been accepted by the scientonomic community".c2 It was also stressed that "the consensus has been manifested on several occasions, including the first scientonomy conference in May 2019 in Toronto, where several of the presenters treated this new ontology as accepted."c3 The fact that the consensus concerning this modification has been achieved primarily off-line, i.e. outside of the discussion pages of this encyclopedia suggests that the scientonomic "workflow must have a way of accommodating these discussions".c4

Suggestions To Reject

These are all the modifications where the rejection of this definition has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Date Assessed	Verdict	Verdict Rationale
Sciento-2018-0019	Scientonomy	28 December 2018	Accept the new definition of theory acceptance which makes explicit that accepted theories are a subset of scientific theories.		Open

Question Answered

Theory Acceptance (Barseghyan-2018) is an attempt to answer the following question: What does it mean to say that a theory is accepted? How should theory acceptance be defined?

See Theory Acceptance for more details.

Description

This definition of the term makes it possible to apply the notion of theory acceptance to any subtype of theory. Unlike the previous definitions of the term, it doesn't imply any specific subtypes of theory, but explicitly states the relation between theories and questions they attempt to answer.

Reasons

No reasons are indicated for this definition.

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Questions About This Definition

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