editor
136
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
|Topic Type=Definitional
|Description=Scientonomy currently accepts three distinct stances which an epistemic agent may take towards a theory: acceptance, use, and pursuit.
Sarwar and Fraser [[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)]] argue that there is another important epistemic stance which may be taken towards theories which the current framework precludes: scientificity. We see from the history of science that epistemic agents view some theories as scientific and some as unscientific; general relativity is currently considered scientific by the contemporary scientific community [[CiteRef::Hartle (2006)]], while the theory of phlogiston is considered unscientific [[CiteRef::Wisniak (20062004)]]. It is generally understood that there exist pseudoscientific theories, which are a subclass of unscientific theories [[CiteRef::Hansson (2017)]]. Furthermore, an agent may not take a definitive stance regarding the scientificity of a theory. Consider the academic discipline of marketing, for instance; there is no consensus about the scientific status of marketing, and there are arguments for and against the claim that marketing is a scientific discipline [[CiteRef::Brown (1996)]][[CiteRef::Anderson (1983)]].
If scientificity is a distinct epistemic stance, it must have a definition, but it is unclear how it should be precisely defined. Consider the following hypothetical formulation: “a theory is said to be scientific if it is taken to deal with a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry”. This may appear to be a plausible starting point, now that questions have been accepted into the scientonomic ontology of epistemic elements, and it might strike one as intuitive that any scientific theory must attempt to answer a scientific question. However, this definition fails for several reasons.
