Modification:Sciento-2018-0009

Accept the new definition of scientific mosaic as a set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by the epistemic agent.

The modification was suggested to Scientonomy community by Hakob Barseghyan on 8 October 2018.1 The modification was accepted on 17 May 2020.

Preamble

TODO: Sinan add a premable

Modification

Theories To Accept

• Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018): A set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by an epistemic agent.

Theories To Reject

• Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015): A set of all accepted theories and employed methods.

Questions Answered

This modification attempts to answer the following question(s):

• Scientific Mosaic: What is scientific mosaic? How should it be defined?

Verdict

The modification was accepted on 17 May 2020. Initially, the modification raised an objection from Patton who argued that the modification "is not acceptable at present, because it contains a term; epistemic agent, which has not yet been defined within scientonomy".^c1 This objection received two counterarguments. According to Barseghyan, the lack of such a definition of epistemic agent should not "be taken as a reason for postponing the acceptance of the definition of scientific mosaic", since inevitably any taxonomy contains terms that "rely in their definitions on other (yet) undefined terms".^c2 This point was seconded by Rawleigh who argued that the definition of scientific mosaic is to be accepted regardless of whether there is an accepted definition of epistemic agent, since "it's de facto accepted already that some agent is required to have a mosaic".^c3 In early 2020, Patton dropped his objection as he found that there was "sufficient general understanding of what an epistemic agent is to accept this definition of the scientific mosaic, even without first accepting a definition of epistemic agent".^c4 Additionally, Rawleigh argued that the definition is to be accepted since we have "already accepted the revised question-theory ontology".^c5

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