Changes

|Formulation Text=A descriptive discipline that attempts to uncover the actual ''general'' mechanism of scientific change.|Formulation File=|Description='''Scientonomy''' is defined as an academic discipline that aims to describe and explain the process of [[Scientific Change|scientific change]]. While still very much in the process of inception, it is conceived to have two major branches - ''theoretical scientonomy'' and ''observational scientonomy''. Theoretical scientonomy attempts to uncover shed light on the axioms ontology and theorems that guide dynamics of the process of scientific change. Observational scientonomy attempts to trace and explain historical and contemporary instances of scientific change.

The term scientonomy refers to the newly emerging ''science of science''. If science is considered the systematic study of the natural universe, then the science of science is the systematic study of the social and cognitive processes that scientists use to undertake this study, as evidenced by what they write and sayinvolving knowledge production. Scientonomy approaches this study in a distinctive way. It is generally accepted nowadays that the body of theories accepted by a scientific community, epistemic agents - individual scientists or epistemic communities - and the methods employed by these agents to evaluate them, ''change over time''. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 217-225]] As the empirical scientific study of this process of scientific change, scientonomy aims at providing a new approach to developing a naturalistic account of how individuals and communities acquire knowledge. It differs from related fields of inquiry, such as history of science or the sociology of scientific knowledge, in that it maintains that the process of scientific change, despite its varied guises, exhibits certain general patterns. It attempt attempts to study and document those patterns by giving them precise formulations. As in any other field of empirical science, the findings of scientonomy are inevitably fallible and are open to modification by the scientonomic community in the light of new evidence.

The basis for this newly emerging field is Barsegyhan's [[The Theory of Scientific Change|theory of scientific change]] as propounded in his 2015 book, ''The Laws of Scientific Change''.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)]] It builds on the ideas of Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan, and others, all of which can be considered precursors of scientonomy. The field of scientonomy, given its distinctive concern for both general theory and the explanation of historical particulars is envisioned as having two branches. First, a theoretical branch attempts to uncover the ontology and the general mechanism of scientific change. Secondly, an observational branch attempts to trace and explain individual changes in the mosaic mosaics of theories accepted by a scientific communityvarious epistemic agents.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 72-80]]

Though highly relevant to the traditional field of philosophy of science, theoretical scientonomy differs from it in that, as a descriptive scientific field, it does not include the normative question of how science ''should '' be conducted so as to produce reliable knowledge. In the past, when a unitary and fixed scientific method was believed to exist, the descriptive question of how the process of scientific change processes actually work works was often conflated with the normative question of how they it should work if reliable knowledge is to be produced. Scientonomy seeks a clear distinction between the two, and claims only the former as its subject matter.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 12-20]] This restriction is motivated by the same concerns as Bloor's symmetry postulate in the sociology of scientific knowledge.[[CiteRef::Golinski (1998)]] Scientonomy's descriptive account, however, does include the descriptive study of normative propositions espoused by scientific practitioners such as those contained in their avowed methodologies, and codes of ethicsopenly accepted norms such as scientific methods or ethical imperatives.[[CiteRef::Sebastien (2016)]] Theoretical scientonomy concerns itself specifically with two major tasks:  #) the identification formulation of a [[The Theory Ontology of Scientific Change|general principles standard ontology]] of epistemic entities and relations involved in the process of scientific change; and #) the unearthing of the [[Mechanism of Scientific Change|general patterns]] useful to a descriptive account of that underlie the processof scientific change.  The search for fixed general laws obviates the charge of incoherent relativism sometimes leveled at the sociology of scientific knowledge.[[CiteRef::Siegel (2011)]] By seeking such laws, it scientonomy hopes to illuminate questions such as the nature of scientific rationality, and the naturalistic epistemological question of how knowledge has been acquired.

Observational scientonomy is seen as differing from the current history of science discipline in significant ways. History of science currently lacks a guiding theory; specifically, the lack of a standardized ontology often results in incommensurable historical narratives. It also often focuses on the level of individual scientists, their work, and their social context, rather than on scientific epistemic communities. By contrast, Scientonomy seeks to focus on scientonomy aims at theory-driven investigations of scientific communities, since it is at the community level that general principles of scientific change are evidentboth individual and communal epistemic agents. It seeks to confront the its current theory of scientific change with evidence that may force its alteration, refinement, or replacement, and to apply it to an expanding range of particular cases, thereby enhancing our general understanding of the processes of scientific change.

|VideoStartAt=|VideoDescription=Scientonomy and the Tree Presentation of Knowledge explained scientonomy by Hakob Barseghyan