24
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
The Paradox of Normative Propositions (view source)
Revision as of 04:21, 4 March 2017
, 04:21, 4 March 2017no edit summary
|Authors List=Joel Burkholder
|Formulated Year=2013
|Prehistory=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.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 52-53]]
|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.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 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.
|Current View=The paradox was resolved by [[Zoe Sebastien]] in 2016 when she suggested a [[The Third Law (Sebastien-2016)|new formulation]] of the third law which made it clear that employed methods shouldn't follow from all accepted theories, but only from some.
}}
