Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021)

This is a definition of Error that states "An epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method."

This definition of Error was formulated by Paul Patton and Sarah Machado-Marques in 2021.1 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	8 October 2021	The theory 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	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2021-0003	Scientonomy	1 August 2021	Accept the definition of error, stating that an epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method.	Accepted	It was agreed that the definition "succeeds in capturing the gist of the notion by explicitly stating that an error is always relative to an epistemic agent and to that agent's employed method".c1 c2 The importance of the concept of error for the Tree of Knowledge project was also noted. Specifically, it was argued that "we must be able to differentiate between those theories which were accepted in accordance with an agent’s employed method and those which were not" so that we can better understand the reasoning underlying individual transitions.c3 Finally, it was suggested that a further distinction between “instances of honest error and misconduct” might be worth pursuing.c4	8 October 2021

Question Answered

Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021) is an attempt to answer the following question: What is error? How should it be defined?

See Error for more details.

Description

There are several different senses in which one might take the concept of scientific error. One is the absolute sense. From our modern perspective, we might judge the geocentric Aristotelean-Ptolemaic cosmology's claim that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe as an error 2. The sense of error we are interested in here is not this absolute sense of error as judged from a future perspective. Instead, our definition takes the perspective of the historical agent and the method employed by the agent at that time. Our definition is grounded in the law of theory acceptance. When a theory is erroneously accepted, the assessing agent believes it has satisfied the requirements of their employed method when, in fact, it has not. Error may be due to an honest mistake by the epistemic agent that created the theory, or to scientific misconduct--actions which the theory-creator agent is aware violate the epistemic and moral norms of scientific inquiry accepted at the time.

Reasons

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Questions About This Definition

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