Changes

===The Scope of Scientonomy===

====The field of scientonomy====

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 say. It is generally accepted nowadays that the body of theories accepted by a scientific community, and the methods employed to evaluate them, change over time. 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 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.