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Employed Method (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017) (view source)
Revision as of 23:53, 30 January 2017
, 23:53, 30 January 2017no edit summary
|Authors List=Paul Patton, Nicholas Overgaard, Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2017
|Description=TODOAccording to this definition of the term, ''employed method'' is nothing but the actual expectations of a certain community at a certain time. This is in tune with the actual scienotnomic usage of the term. It is safe to say that this definition is tacitly used throughout Barseghyan's [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']]. For instance, when he says that the method of intuition schooled by experience was employed by the community of Aristotelian-Medieval natural philosophers, he actually means that this community expected new theories to be intuitively true.[[CiteRef: explain:Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 143-145]][[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]] When he says that the double-blind trial method is currently employed in drug testing, he means that "the community expects new drugs to be tested in double-blind trials".[[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 134-142]] Originally, this tacit definition of employed method has been repeatedly conflated with [[Employed Method (Barseghyan-2015)|the official definition of the term]] given on page 54 of ''The Laws of Scientific Change''.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 54,144,145]] However, a community’s expectations were not mentioned in Barseghyan's [[Employed Method (Barseghyan-2015)|original definition]] of employed method. This new definition of ''employed method'' as "expectations of the community" was suggested to fix this conflation.
|Resource=Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)
|History=The major flaw of [[Employed Method (Barseghyan-2015)|the previous definition of the term]] was that it defined method employment in terms of the ''indicators'' of method employment. The definition confused the actual phenomenon of method employment with scientonomic means of ''detecting'' method employment. This is unacceptable, since employed methods can, in principle, be detected in many different ways. For instance, the fact of a method’s employment can be detected by analyzing the record of transitions from one accepted theory to the next in a particular community at a particular time. Alternatively, we can try to infer the employed method of the time from our knowledge of the body of accepted theories using [[The Third Law|the third law]]. The previous definition of ''employed method'' equated method employment with one particular way of ''identifying'' method employment. According to the authors of the new definition:[[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]]
