Deducibility in Method Employment

What does deducibility in the the law of method employment mean? Does it refer to the deducibility of classic logic, or to a logic accepted by the community at the time?

The current formulation of the law of method employment asserts that a method becomes employed when it is deducible from some accepted theories and employed methods. However, it is unclear as to what deducibility here is to mean, as the notion of deducibility varies from logic to logic. One approach is to assume that newly employed methods must be deducible in the rules of classical logic, but this runs the risk of historical anachronism. The immediate alternative would be to assume that methods must be deducible in the rules of the logic accepted by the community at the time, but this poses an issue for observational scientonomy, in that it allows potential 'hand-waving.' If the employment of a method would violate the law of method employment, then it can be posited that the agent in question merely accepted a different logic, especially without establishing indicators of the accepted logic.

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Calahan Janik-Jones and Patrick Fraser in 2018. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answer to the question is:

• A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.

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 March 2018	It was acknowledged as an open question by the Scientonomy Seminar 2018.	Yes

All Theories

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Accepted Theories

No direct answer to this question has ever been accepted.

Suggested Modifications

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Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted answer to the question is The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022).

Mechanism of Method Employment

The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022) states: "A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic."

This law of method employment is a corollary of Rawleigh's law of norm employment. It implies that, just like the norms of all other types, methods become employed when they are derivable from other elements of the agent's mosaic (such as other theories, other methods, and perhaps even questions). As such, the law preserves most of the content of Sebastien's third law by solving some of the issues inherent in it.

See The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022) for a more thorough exposition.

Related Topics

This question is a subquestion of Mechanism of Method Employment.

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

• Employed Method
• Deriving Methods from an Empty Set