Changes

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 involving knowledge production. Scientonomy approaches this study in a distinctive way. It is generally accepted nowadays that the body of theories accepted by 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 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 in the light of new evidence.

====Theoretical scientonomy====

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 actually works was often conflated with the normative question of how 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 openly accepted norms such as scientific methods or ethical imperatives.[[CiteRef::Sebastien (2016)]] Theoretical scientonomy concerns itself specifically with two major tasks:

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, scientonomy hopes to illuminate questions such as the nature of scientific rationality, and the naturalistic epistemological question of how knowledge has been acquired.