Discipline Acceptance

What is discipline acceptance? How should it be defined?

An epistemic agent can accept or reject a discipline. It is important, therefore, to understand what this acceptance amounts to, i.e. what happens at the level of individual epistemic elements when an agent accepts a discipline.

In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Paul Patton and Cyrus Al-Zayadi in 2021. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is:

• A discipline is said to be accepted by an epistemic agent if that agent accepts the core questions specified in the discipline’s delineating theory as well as the delineating theory itself.

Scientonomic History

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 August 2021	This is when Patton and Al-Zayadi's Disciplines in the Scientonomic Ontology that offered a definition of the term was published. This is a good indication that the question of how the term is to be defined is considered legitimate by the community.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Discipline Acceptance (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021)	A discipline is said to be accepted by an epistemic agent if that agent accepts the core questions specified in the discipline’s delineating theory as well as the delineating theory itself.	2021

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Accepted Theories

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

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Discipline Acceptance (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021)	21 February 2024

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2021-0006	Scientonomy	1 August 2021	Accept new definitions of subquestion, core question, core theory, discipline, delineating theory, subdiscipline, and discipline acceptance.	Accepted	Prior to the 2024 workshop, Hakob Barseghyan commented on the encyclopedia indicating his support for accepting this modification and noted its potential to underpin further work on discipline dynamics. In fact, a significant amount of observational scientonomy work has been carried out in the past few years (including the paper on the rejection of alchemy by Friesen and Patton (2023),1 as well as some more recent papers) that presupposes the acceptance of these definitions, despite the fact that the modification containing them formally remains open. There was very little discussion about the modification, beyond raising points for the community to look forward to in the future, like a brief discussion between Jamie Shaw and Paul Patton about the need for more research on the difference between disciplines and disciplinary communities. The modification was accepted unanimously with 18 votes.	21 February 2024

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is Discipline Acceptance (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021).

Discipline Acceptance (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021) states: "A discipline is said to be accepted by an epistemic agent if that agent accepts the core questions specified in the discipline’s delineating theory as well as the delineating theory itself."

Theories and questions can both be the subject of the epistemic stances of epistemic agents.234 Disciplines like biology, physics, and astrology can also be the subject of such stances. For example, biology and physics are accepted by the scientific community of the modern world as disciplines, but astrology is rejected. In our definition, a discipline is said to be accepted by an epistemic agent if that agent accepts the core questions specified in the discipline's delineating theory, as well as the delineating theory itself.5

This definition takes discipline acceptance to be derivative of theory acceptance and question acceptance. It requires first, that an agent accepts the delineating theory that specifies that a particular set of core questions characterize a discipline. For example, the scientific community accepts that the question 'how do matter and energy behave? is a core question of modern physics. The community also accepts the question itself. Therefore, they can be said to accept physics as a discipline. The scientific community of the modern world also accepts that the question 'how do the positions of celestial objects at the time of one's birth influence one's character?' is a core question of astrology. However, they do not accept the question itself, because they reject its supposition that such an influence exists. Thus, the scientific community rejects the discipline of astrology.

Related Topics

This topic is also related to the following topic(s):

• Core Question
• Core Theory
• Discipline