Changes

|Description=[[Methodology|methodologiesMethodologies]], the rules of theory assessment openly prescribed by a scientific community, are one species of normative propositions. Methodologies are ''prescriptive'', as they prescribe how theory assessment within a scientific community ''ought'' to be performed. There are many historical cases where employed [[Method|scientific methods]] are known to conflict with professed methodologies. For example: eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists openly accepted a version of the ''empiricist inductivist methodology'', which required new theories to be deducible from phenomena and not posit any unobservable entities. However, these scientists still accepted theories that posited unobservable entities, such as phlogiston, electric fluid, or absolute space.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 52-53]] This seems to violate either [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)|the third law]] or [[The Zeroth Law (Harder-2015)|the zeroth law]] of scientific change. By the third law, employed methods are always deductive consequences of accepted theories. But, this seems impossible in cases where accepted methodologies and employed methods conflict. Under the zeroth law, all elements in the scientific mosaic are compatible with one another. But, that seems to be clearly not the case if methodologies and methods conflict with one another. How can this paradox be resolved?

|Formulated Year=2013|Prehistory=A2014|History=Within the scientonomic context, it was initially unclear whether normative propositions (such as those of methodology or ethics) fell within the scope of scientonomy and could hold a place within a scientific mosaic. This uncertainty included methodological dicta. The problem became acute when ''the paradox of normative propositions '' was identified by Joel Burkholder in 20132014. In [[CiteRef::Burkholder (2014)]] As a result, in [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']] Barseghyan left the question of the status of normative propositions open, Barseghyan noted by noting that further theoretical work, together coupled with empirical historical 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 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. 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. 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 problem was that including methodologies in the scientific mosaic would result in violations of the third law of scientific change. At the time, [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)|the third law]] stated that "a method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time". But if ''methodologies'' were to be considered ''theories'', then, by the third law, employed ''methods'' would have to be deductive consequences of accepted methodologies. among other things. If employed methods were deducible from accepted methodologies, then how could there ever be any discrepancy between employed methods and accepted methodologies? This wouldn't make any sense from a logical perspective.  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 20162017. The modifications consequently accepted included changing the definition of ''theory '' from “a "a set of propositions that attempt to describe something” something" to “a "a set of propositions”propositions".[[CiteRef::Sebastien (2016)]] This new definition of ''theory '' could include normative propositions and, as a result, methodologies.