Scientonomy Seminar
Scientonomy seminar is held annually by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Toronto. The seminar usually starts in January and ends in April consisting of 11 discussion sessions. The main goal of the seminar is to scrutinize different aspects of the current scientonomic theory and formulate open questions. As opposed to the workshop format, the seminar's primary objective is unearthing the drawbacks of our current scientonomic knowledge, i.e. understanding what does not work. While the seminar also often generates interesting ideas on how this or that question can be solved, the primary outcome of the seminar is the list of open questions. The idea is to provide questions for future research.
History
The seminar was first designed and run by Hakob Barseghyan in 2013. Originally, the seminar had a wider focus and tried to accomplish the two following tasks:
- scrutinizing each aspect of the current theory and understanding what is not working;
- generating ideas on how the theory can be improved by finding solutions to topical issues.
It took the seminar three full iterations before it became clear that its main focus should be focusing on the former task, i.e. on compiling a list of open questions for future research. Although the previous iterations of the seminar produced a number of interesting open questions, the seminar of 2016 was to aim directly at producing open questions. It was the first year when a comprehensive list of open questions was generated.
Present
The seminar currently takes place at the beginning of every year and focuses on the task of unearthing the drawbacks of our current scientonomic knowledge.
If a question raises a sufficient level of interest or disagreement, it is considered an open question. Clearly, this criterion is somewhat vague and not very strict; as a result, the list of open questions can sometimes include questions ,the answers to which may appear trivial. However, this is done on purpose; the assumption here is that an occasional inclusion of a trivial question outweighs the risk of missing an important question.
