Mechanism of Norm Employment

How do norms become employed by an epistemic agent?

As norms of any type - methods, ethical norms, aesthetic norms, etc. - can change through time, it is important to inquire as to how exactly they change. A proper answer to this question helps to shed light on one of the key aspects of the mechanism of scientific change.

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by William Rawleigh in 2022. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answer to the question is:

• A norm becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.

Broader History

One aspect of the question of the mechanism of norm employment - that of method employment has been addressed by a number of philosophers of science before the inception of scientonomy. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Dudley Shapere, Larry Laudan, and Ernan McMullin all suggested that our theories about the world shape our methods of theory evaluation.

Thomas Kuhn can be credited by articulating this idea first in his Structure as part of his conception of paradigm shifts.1

Dudley Shapere greatly developed the idea of beliefs affecting methods of theory evaluation in his The Character of Scientific Change, where he argued that the criteria scientists employ in theory assessment are not transcendent to science but are an integral part of it.2

Similarly, in his Science and Values, Larry Laudan argued that the discovery of previously unaccounted effects (such as placebo effect or experimenter's bias) resulted in the formulation of new methods of drug testing.3pp. 38-39

The same idea has been expressed around the same time by Ernan McMullin. In his account of the transition from the Aristotelian Medieval method to the hypothetico-deductive method in the early 18th century, McMullin shows that the employment of the hypothetico-deductivism was a result of accepting that the world is more complex than it appears in our observations.4pp. 32-34

There have been many other attempts at explaining how methods of theory evaluation come to be employed by a community (e.g. the reconstructions of Plato’s method performed by David Lindberg5pp. 37-38).

Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar and other have suggested that methods of science are determined to a large degree by the underlying sociocultural factors.67

Paul Feyerabend went as far as to argue that in many cases methods are chosen in an arbitrary fashion.8

Scientonomic History

Norms only became part of the scientonomic ontology in 2017 with the acceptance of Sebastien's modification that introduced normative theories one of as types of theory. With the acceptance of Barseghyan's redrafted ontology in 2019, methods became subsumed under the category of normative theory and employment became a stance that epistemic agents could take towards norms of all types, not just methods. This should have suggested the question of the mechanism of norm employment; yet, as formulating questions is often a creative process, it wasn't until Rawleigh's 2022 paper that the question was explicitly formulated, together with a formulation of an answer to it - the law of norm employment.

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	28 February 2022	This is the date of the publication of the collected volume that included Rawleigh's paper, which indicates that the question is itself came to be considered legitimate.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022)	A norm becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.	2022

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022)	21 February 2024

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
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.	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.	21 February 2024

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted answer to the question is The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022).

The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022) states: "A norm becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic."

Sebastien's law of method employment faces several problems. Foremost among these is that it is based on an outdated ontology that assumes that methods of theory evaluation are a fundamental epistemic element. After the acceptance of Barseghyan’s proposal that methods be subsumed under the category of normative theories, the third law no longer exhaustively covers all situations cases of employment. In its present form it is limited to methods, though there is no reason to think that the mechanism by which a method is employed is any different than the mechanism by which any other norm is employed.

In addition, Sebastien's formulation of the third law uses the term deducible, which currently lacks a scientonomic definition. We do not currently know what it means for something to be deducible, what the criteria of deducibility would be, or whether the conditions of deducibility would be part of the first-order theories of the mosaic or part of the second-order theories that range over the mosaic.

The third issue with Sebastien's formulation is that, with the acceptance of questions into the epistemic elements of the ontology of scientific change, the elements of the mosaic are now more expansive than just theories and subtypes of theories. This means that there is a plausible situation in which norms could potentially be derived – at least in part – from questions, which means that a formulation of the third law that excludes questions would fail to comprehensively describe all cases of norm employment.

The new law of norm employment aims to remedy all three of these issues:

• the formulation of the covers all norms rather than only methods;
• it replaces a deducible with derivable, which in the context of mathematical model theory simply means to be semantically entailed, and thus can potentially include non-deductive inferences (e.g. inductive, abductive);
• it replaces a specific enumeration of epistemic elements with a general "elements of the mosaic".

This formulation also offers the slight clarification that derivability strictly deals with derivation from a finite number of other elements.

Related Topics

This question is a subquestion of Mechanism of Scientific Change. It has the following sub-topic(s):

• Mechanism of Method Employment

This topic is also related to the following topic(s):

• Mechanism of Method Employment
• Mechanism of Theory Acceptance