The Paradox of Normative Propositions

If methodologies are themselves theories that can be accepted by a community, then how can methods be deductive consequences of accepted theories, given that historically employed methods and accepted methodologies have often been inconsistent with one another?

There are many historical cases where employed scientific methods are known to conflict with professed methodologies. This seems to violate either the third law or 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?

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Joel Burkholder in 2014. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question can be summarized as follows:

• The new third law resolves the paradox of normative propositions by making it clear that employed methods don't necessarily follow from all accepted theories, but only from some.
• A method becomes employed only when it is deducible from some subset of other employed methods and accepted theories of the time.

Broader History

Normative propositions lie within the realm of methodologies. Methodologies of a scientific community are explicitly formulated rules of theory assessment. Methodologies are prescriptive, meaning that they describe how theory assessment within a scientific community ought to be performed. The history of science is filled with cases wherein there is a difference between implicit methods and explicit methodologies. For example: eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists outwardly supported 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, and components of Newton’s physical theories.1pp. 52-53

Scientonomic History

At first, within the scientonomic community, it was unclear whether normative propositions could hold a place within a scientific mosaic—and, therefore, within the scope of a theory of scientific change. This uncertainty also applied to methodological dicta; it was proposed that a full-fledged theory of scientific change, together with history, could attempt to settle the issue.1p. 60 At that time, however, the theory of scientific change did not include normative propositions until the production and acceptance of modifications suggested by Zoe Sebastien—modifications which included changing the definition of theory from, “a set of propositions that attempt to describe something,” to, “a set of propositions.” 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.

Once normative propositions and methodologies began to count as theories, the paradox of normative propositions arose. The problem was that it appeared to violate the third law of scientific change, which stated: a method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time. If employed methods can must be deducible from other methods or methodologies, differences in methods and methodologies would result in a violation—either methods can follow from methodologies or they can’t. Not only was the third law violated, the incompatibility of the conjuncts of the paradox (that methodologies count as theories; and the third law stating that methods should follow from said methodologies) resulted in the zeroth law’s violation as well. The zeroth law states that at any moment, the theories in a mosaic must be compatible.

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 January 2016	The question became de facto accepted by the community at that time together with the whole theory of scientific change.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Resolution to the Paradox of Normative Propositions (Sebastien-2016)	The new third law resolves the paradox of normative propositions by making it clear that employed methods don't necessarily follow from all accepted theories, but only from some.	2016

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Resolution to the Paradox of Normative Propositions (Sebastien-2016)	21 January 2017

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2016-0001	Scientonomy	3 September 2016	Accept a new formulation of the third law to make it clear that employed methods do not have to be deducible from all accepted theories and employed methods but only from some.	Accepted	There was a community consensus that "the new formulation of the third law does bring an additional level of precision to our understanding of the mechanism of method change".c1 The community agreed that the new formulation "makes a clarification that, on its own, warrants this modification's acceptance".c2 Importantly, it was also agreed that the modification "solves the paradox of normative propositions".c3	21 January 2017

Current View

The paradox was resolved by Zoe Sebastien in 2016 when she suggested a new formulation of the third law which made it clear that employed methods shouldn't follow from all accepted theories, but only from some.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question are Resolution to the Paradox of Normative Propositions (Sebastien-2016) and The Third Law (Sebastien-2016).

Resolution to the Paradox of Normative Propositions (Sebastien-2016) states: "The new third law resolves the paradox of normative propositions by making it clear that employed methods don't necessarily follow from all accepted theories, but only from some."

The paradox of normative propositions arises from the following three premises:

1. there have been many historical cases where employed scientific methods conflicted with professed methodologies;
2. by the third law, employed methods are deducible from accepted theories, including methodologies;
3. two proposition cannot be mutually inconsistent if one logically follows from another.

Sebastien's solution rejects premise (2), by clarifying that an employed method shouldn't necessarily follow from all accepted theories, but only from some. In those cases, when an employed method is in conflict with an accepted methodology, it is an indication that the former doesn't follow from the latter. As for their mutual inconsistency, that is allowed by the zeroth law.

Mechanism of Method Employment

The Third Law (Sebastien-2016) states: "A method becomes employed only when it is deducible from some subset of other employed methods and accepted theories of the time."

The initial formulation of the law, proposed by Barseghyan in The Laws of Scientific Change, stated that a method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time.1p.132 In that formulation, it wasn't clear whether employed methods follow from all or only some of the accepted theories and employed methods of the time. This led to a logical paradox which this reformulation attempts to solve.2

This reformulation of the law makes explicit that an employed method need not necessarily follow from all other employed methods and accepted theories but only from some of them. This made it possible for an employed method to be logically inconsistent and yet compatible with openly accepted methodological dicta.

In all other respects, this formulation preserves the gist of Barseghyan's original formulation. According to the third law, a method becomes employed when:

1. it strictly follows from some subset of other employed methods and accepted theories, or
2. it implements some abstract requirements of other employed methods.

This restates Barseghyan's original suggestion that accepted theories shape the set of implicit criteria employed in theory assessment. When a new theory is accepted, this often leads to the employment of an abstract requirement to take that new theory into account when testing relevant contender theories. This abstract requirement is then specified by a new employed method.

The evolution of the drug trial methods is an example of the third law in action. For example, the discovery of the placebo effect in drug testing demonstrates that fake treatment can cause improvement in patient symptoms. As a result of its discovery the abstract requirement of “when assessing a drug’s efficacy, the possible placebo effect must be taken into account” was generated. This abstract requirement is, by definition, an accepted theory which stipulates that, if ignored, substantial doubt would be cast on any trial. As a result of this new theory, the Single-Blind Trial method was devised. The currently employed method in drug testing is the Double-Blind Trial, a method which specifies all of the abstract requirements of its predecessors. It is an apt illustration of how new methods are generated through the acceptance of new theories, as well as how new methods employ the abstract requirements of their predecessors.1pp. 132-152

In Barseghyan’s explication of the Aristotelian-Medieval method, he illustrates how Aristotelian natural philosophy impacted the method of the time. One of the key features of the Aristotelian-scholastic method was the requirement of intuition schooled by experience, i.e. that a proposition is acceptable if it grasps the nature of a thing though intuition schooled by experience. The requirement itself was a deductive consequence of several assumptions accepted at the time. One of the assumptions underlying this requirement was the idea that every natural thing has a nature, a substantial quality that makes a thing what it is (e.g. a human's nature is their capacity of reason). Another assumption underlying the requirement was the idea that nature of a thing can be grasped intuitively by those who are most experienced with the things of that type. The requirements of the intuitive truth followed from these assumptions. The scholastic-Aristotelians scholars wouldn’t require intuitive truths grasped by an experienced person if they didn’t believe that things have natures that could be grasped intuitively by experts.

The third law has also proven useful in explicating such requirements as Confirmed Novel Predictions (CNP). According to the hypothetico-deductive method, a theory which challenges our accepted ontology must provide CNP in order to become accepted. However, the history of CNP has been a point of confusion for some time. By the Third Law, one can show that the requirement of CNP has not always been expected of new theories. When Newton published his Principia, CNP were not a requirement of his professed method, yet they were still provided. On the other hand, Clark’s law of diminishing returns had no such predictions. This is because Newton’s proposal of unobservable entities, such as gravity and absolute space, challenged the accepted ontology of the time, while Clark’s simply accounted for the data already available. Thus, in utilizing the Third Law, one can discover both when certain criteria become an implicit rule and under what conditions they are necessary.

Related Topics

This question is a subquestion of Mechanism of Method Employment.