Scientific Mosaic

What is scientific mosaic? How should it be defined?

Scientific mosaic is one of the key concepts in current scientonomy. Thus, its proper definition is of great importance.

In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Hakob Barseghyan in 2015. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is:

• A set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by an epistemic agent.

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this term (it includes all the instances when the term was accepted as a part of a community's taxonomy):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 January 2016	This is when the community accepted its first definition of the term, Scientific Mosaic (2015), which indicates that the question is itself considered legitimate.	Yes

All Theories

The following definitions of the term have been suggested:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015)	A set of all accepted theories and employed methods.	2015
Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018)	A set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by an epistemic agent.	2018
Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022)	A model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent.	2022

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Accepted Theories

The following definitions of the term have been accepted:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015)	1 January 2016	17 May 2020
Scientonomy	Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018)	17 May 2020

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this term:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2018-0009	Scientonomy	8 October 2018	Accept the new definition of scientific mosaic as a set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by the epistemic agent.	Accepted	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	17 May 2020
Sciento-2022-0001	Scientonomy	28 February 2022	Accept a new model-theoretic definition of scientific mosaic, according to which, a scientific mosaic is a model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent.	Open

Current Definition

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018).

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

According to this definition, scientific mosaic encompasses all accepted and employed epistemic elements. The definition is compatible with the ontology of epistemic elements that considers questions and theories (including methods as a sub-type of normative theories) as the only two fundamental types of epistemic elements. In addition, by not referring to any epistemic element explicitly, the definition also purports to be compatible with any future ontology of epistemic elements insofar as that ontology assumes that elements can be accepted and employed.

Ontology

Existence

In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted claims concerning the existence of Scientific Mosaic.

Disjointness

In Scientonomy, no classes are currently accepted as disjoint with Scientific Mosaic.

Subtypes

In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted subtypes of Scientific Mosaic.

Supertypes

In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted supertypes of Scientific Mosaic.

Associations

In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted associations of Scientific Mosaic.

If a question concerning the ontology of a scientific mosaic is missing, please add it here.

Dynamics

If a question concerning the dynamics of a scientific mosaic is missing, please add it here.

Related Topics

This term is also related to the following topic(s):

• Mechanism of Scientific Change
• Employed Method
• Scientific Change
• Theory Acceptance
• Theory
• Method