Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, editor, Interface administrators, Administrators (Semantic MediaWiki), Curators (Semantic MediaWiki), Suppressors, Administrators, Widget editors
11,019
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
|Parent Topic=Mechanism of Scientific Change|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
no edit summary
{{Topic
|QuestionSubject=How do ''methods'' become ''employed'' by a community in theory assessment?Method Employment
|Topic Type=Descriptive
|Subfield=Dynamics
|Inherited From=
|Heritable=No
|Question Text Formula=
|Question Title Formula=
|Question=How do [[Method|methods]] become [[Norm Employment|employed]] by an epistemic agent?
|Question Title=
|Predicate=
|Object Type=Text
|Object Value True=
|Object Value False=
|Object Class=
|Object Enum Values=
|Object Regexp=
|Single Answer Text Formula=
|Multiple Answers Text Formula=
|Answer Title Formula=
|Description=When the classical philosophy of science finally came to terms with the fact that [[Method|methods]] of theory assessment do in fact change through time, the question became ''how'' exactly they change. Since circa 1980, explaining the process of transitions from one employed method to the next has been one of the most challenging tasks for any theory of scientific change. A proper answer to this question helps to shed light on one of the key aspects of scientific change.
|Formulated Year=2015
|Prehistory=A number of philosophers of science addressed the question of method employment 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 [[Kuhn (19621962a)|''Structure'']] as part of his conception of paradigm shifts.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (19621962a)]]
[[Dudley Shapere]] greatly developed the idea of beliefs affecting methods of theory evaluation in his [[Shapere (1980)|''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.[[CiteRef::Shapere (1980)]]
Similarly, in his [[Laudan (19841984a)|''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.[[CiteRef::Laudan (19841984a)|pp. 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.[[CiteRef::McMullin (1988)|pp. 32-34]]
[[Paul Feyerabend]] went as far as to argue that in many cases methods are chosen in an arbitrary fashion.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]]
|History=In the context of scientonomy the answer to this question has been traditionally provided by [[The Third Law|the third law]]. Until 2016 2017 it was Barseghyan's [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)|the original third law]] as formulated by [[Hakob Barseghyan]].[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 54]] In this 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 was [[Modification:Sciento-2016-0001|resolved]] by [[Zoe Sebastien]] in 2016. In her Sebastien's [[The Third Law (Sebastien-2016)|reformulation of the law]], Sebastien made it explicit that an employed method need not necessarily follow from ''all'' other employed methods and accepted theories but only from ''some'' of them. [[CiteRef::Sebastien (2016)]] This made it possible for an employed method to be logically inconsistent and yet ''compatible'' with openly accepted [[Methodology|methodological dicta]].Sebastien's formulation became accepted in 2017.|Current View=|Parent Topic=Mechanism of Norm Employment|Related Topics=Mechanism of Theory Acceptance, Role of Sociocultural Factors in Method Employment,|Sorting Order=300|Page Status=Editor Approved|Editor Notes=|Order=1
|Related Theories=The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015), The Third Law (Sebastien-2016),
}}
|Acceptance Indicators=This is when the community accepted its first answer to this question, [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)]], which indicates that the question is itself considered legitimate.
|Still Accepted=Yes
|Accepted Until Era=
|Accepted Until Year=
|Accepted Until Month=
|Accepted Until Day=
|Accepted Until Approximate=No
|Rejection Indicators=
}}
