The Third Law (Sebastien-2016)
This is an answer to the question Mechanism of Method Employment that states "A method becomes employed only when it is deducible from some subset of other employed methods and accepted theories of the time."
This version of The Third Law was formulated by Zoe Sebastien in 2016.1 It is also known as the law of method employment.
Scientonomic History
The law replaced Barseghyan's original formulation of the Third Law. Sebastien's third law was the first to be accepted by Scientonomy community via the scientonomic mechanism of modifications.
Acceptance Record
Community | Accepted From | Acceptance Indicators | Still Accepted | Accepted Until | Rejection Indicators |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Scientonomy | 21 January 2017 | The law became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective suggested modification. | No | 21 February 2024 | The law became rejected as a result of the acceptance of the respective modification. It became replaced by Rawleigh's 2022 law of norm employment. |
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-2016-0001 | Scientonomy | 3 September 2016 | Accept a new formulation of the third law to make it clear that employed methods do not have to be deducible from all accepted theories and employed methods but only from some. | 21 January 2017 | Accepted | There was a community consensus that "the new formulation of the third law does bring an additional level of precision to our understanding of the mechanism of method change".c1 The community agreed that the new formulation "makes a clarification that, on its own, warrants this modification's acceptance".c2 Importantly, it was also agreed that the modification "solves the paradox of normative propositions".c3 |
Suggestions To Reject
These are all the modifications where the rejection 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 Third Law (Sebastien-2016) 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
The initial formulation of the law, proposed by Barseghyan in The Laws of Scientific Change, stated that a method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time.2 In that formulation, it wasn't clear whether employed methods follow from all or only some of the accepted theories and employed methods of the time. This led to a logical paradox which this reformulation attempts to solve.1
This reformulation of the law makes explicit that an employed method need not necessarily follow from all other employed methods and accepted theories but only from some of them. This made it possible for an employed method to be logically inconsistent and yet compatible with openly accepted methodological dicta.
Reasons
No reasons are indicated for this theory.
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Questions About This Theory
There are no higher-order questions concerning this theory.
If a question about this theory is missing, please add it here.
References
- a b Sebastien, Zoe. (2016) The Status of Normative Propositions in the Theory of Scientific Change. Scientonomy 1, 1-9. Retrieved from https://www.scientojournal.com/index.php/scientonomy/article/view/26947.
- ^ Barseghyan, Hakob. (2015) The Laws of Scientific Change. Springer.