Changes

|History=Within the scientonomic context, it was at first initially unclear whether normative propositions fell within the scope of scientonomy and could hold a place within a scientific mosaic and therefore be considered within the scope of scientonomy. This uncertainty included methodological dicta. The problem became acute when the paradox of normative propositions was identified by Joel Burkholder in 2013. In 2015, Barseghyan noted that further theoretical work, together with empirical evidence from the history of scientific change, would be needed to settle the issue.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 60]] The problem was that including methodologies in the scientific mosaic appeared to result in a violation of violated the third law of scientific change, which then stated: a method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time. The problem arose This is because of clear historical evidence of conflict between espoused methodologies and actual employed methods. If employed methods must be deducible from other methods or methodologies, discrepancies between accepted methodologies and employed methods would result in a violation of the law, because methods must then follow deductively from accepted methodologies. Not only was the third law violated but, if an employed method and an accepted methodology were incompatible with one another, but both included within the same mosaic, the zeroth law would be violated, since the law maintains that, at any moment, the theories in the mosaic will be compatible.

The theory of scientific change did not include normative propositions until a resolution to the paradox of normative propositions proposed by [[Zoe Sebastien]] was accepted by the scientonomic community in 2016. The modifications consequently accepted included changing the definition of theory from “a set of propositions that attempt to describe something” to “a set of propositions”.[[CiteRef::Sebastien (2016)]] This new definition of theory could include normative propositions and, as a result, methodologies. However, regarding this new definition of ‘theory’ as encompassing methodologies, a paradox appears when this definition comes into contact with other components of the theory of scientific change.