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|Authors List=Ameer Sarwar, Patrick Fraser
|Formulated Year=2018
|Description=Like [[Demarcation Criteria|demarcation]] and [[Acceptance Criteria|acceptance criteria]], compatibility criteria can be part of an epistemic agent's employed method. An epistemic agent employs these criteria to determine whether two elements (e.g. methods, theories, questions) are mutually compatible or incompatible, i.e. whether they can be simultaneously part of the agent's mosaic. In principle, these criteria can be employed to determine the compatibility of elements present in the mosaic, as well as those outside of it (e.g. scientists often think about whether a proposed theory is compatible with the theories actually accepted at the time). [[Patrick Fraser|Fraser]] and [[Ameer Sarwar|Sarwar]] point out that [[Hakob Barseghyan|Barseghyan]]'s [[Compatibility Criteria (Barseghyan-2015)|original definition]] of the term "excludes a simple point that is assumed elsewhere in scientonomy: elements other than theories (i.e. methods and questions) may be compatible or incompatible with other elements (which, again, need not be theories)".[[CiteRef::Fraser and Sarwar (2018)|p. 72]] To fix this omission, Fraser and Sarwar "suggest that the word ‘theories’ be changed to ‘elements’ to account for the fact that the compatibility criteria apply to theories, methods, and questions alike".[[CiteRef::Fraser and Sarwar (2018)|p. 72]] Different communities can have different compatibility criteria. While some communities may opt to employ the logical law of noncontradiction as their criterion of compatibility, other communities may be more tolerant towards logical inconsistencies. According to Barseghyan, the fact that these days scientists "often simultaneously accept theories which strictly speaking logically contradict each other is a good indication that the actual criteria of compatibility employed by the scientific community might be quite different from the classical logical law of noncontradiction".[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 11]] For example, this is apparent in the case of general relativity vs. quantum physics where both theories are accepted as the best available descriptions of their respective domains (i.e. they are considered ''compatible''), but are known to be in conflict when applied simultaneously to such objects as black holes.
|Resource=Fraser and Sarwar (2018)
|Prehistory=

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