Scientific Mosaic
What is scientific mosaic? How should it be defined?
Scientific mosaic is one of the key concepts in current scientonomy. Thus, its proper definition is of great importance.
In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Hakob Barseghyan in 2015. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community.
In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is:
- A model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent.
Contents
Scientonomic History
Acceptance Record
| Community | Accepted From | Acceptance Indicators | Still Accepted | Accepted Until | Rejection Indicators |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scientonomy | 1 January 2016 | This is when the community accepted its first definition of the term, Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015), which indicates that the question is itself considered legitimate. | Yes |
All Theories
| Theory | Formulation | Formulated In |
|---|---|---|
| Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015) | A set of all accepted theories and employed methods. | 2015 |
| Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018) | A set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by an epistemic agent. | 2018 |
| Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022) | A model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent. | 2022 |
Accepted Theories
| Community | Theory | Accepted From | Accepted Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scientonomy | Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2015) | 1 January 2016 | 17 May 2020 |
| Scientonomy | Scientific Mosaic (Barseghyan-2018) | 17 May 2020 | 21 February 2024 |
| Scientonomy | Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022) | 21 February 2024 |
Suggested Modifications
| Modification | Community | Date Suggested | Summary | Verdict | Verdict Rationale | Date Assessed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sciento-2018-0009 | Scientonomy | 8 October 2018 | Accept the new definition of scientific mosaic as a set of all epistemic elements accepted and/or employed by the epistemic agent. | Accepted | Initially, the modification raised an objection from Patton who argued that the modification "is not acceptable at present, because it contains a term; epistemic agent, which has not yet been defined within scientonomy".c1 This objection received two counterarguments. According to Barseghyan, the lack of such a definition of epistemic agent should not "be taken as a reason for postponing the acceptance of the definition of scientific mosaic", since inevitably any taxonomy contains terms that "rely in their definitions on other (yet) undefined terms".c2 This point was seconded by Rawleigh who argued that the definition of scientific mosaic is to be accepted regardless of whether there is an accepted definition of epistemic agent, since "it's de facto accepted already that some agent is required to have a mosaic".c3 In early 2020, Patton dropped his objection as he found that there was "sufficient general understanding of what an epistemic agent is to accept this definition of the scientific mosaic, even without first accepting a definition of epistemic agent".c4 Additionally, Rawleigh argued that the definition is to be accepted since we have "already accepted the revised question-theory ontology".c5 | 17 May 2020 |
| Sciento-2022-0001 | Scientonomy | 28 February 2022 | Accept a new model-theoretic definition of scientific mosaic, according to which, a scientific mosaic is a model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent. | Accepted | Nobody submitted opinions on this modification to the encyclopedia prior to the 2024 workshop. At the workshop, most of the discussion focused around the differences in wording between the earlier definition of scientific mosaic and the new one as formulated by Rawleigh. It was clarified that there is little difference in meaning between the definitions, but Rawleigh’s modification addressed the concern that the old language for describing a scientific mosaic was couched in terms of set theory, which Jamie Shaw pointed out would pose a problem for how we typically talk about mosaics (classifying mosaics by their number of elements is not particularly helpful for scientonomers). The new model-theoretic definition seemed more intuitive to some members of the community, even though neither definition commits to any syntactic view of theories. Some members of the community did not vote on the modification given their lack of experience with set theory, but overall the modification was accepted by over a two-thirds majority of voters. 13 out of 15 votes were to accept. | 21 February 2024 |
Current Definition
In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022).
Scientific Mosaic (Rawleigh-2022) states: "A model of all epistemic elements accepted or employed by the epistemic agent."
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Rather than conceiving a scientific mosaic as a simple set-theoretic unity of epistemic elements, this definition is model-theoretic: it replaces the explicitly set-theoretic wording “set of all epistemic elements” with a semantic “model of all accepted elements”.1p. 91 The definition considers a scientific mosaic to be a model for interpreting all natural language sentences, whether those be observational, theoretical, or simply ordinary conversational sentences.
TODO: Add Rawleigh's discussion from his 2022.
Ontology
Existence
In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted claims concerning the existence of Scientific Mosaic.
Disjointness
In Scientonomy, no classes are currently accepted as disjoint with Scientific Mosaic.
Subtypes
In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted subtypes of Scientific Mosaic.
Supertypes
In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted supertypes of Scientific Mosaic.
Associations
In Scientonomy, there are currently no accepted associations of Scientific Mosaic.
If a question concerning the ontology of a scientific mosaic is missing, please add it here.
Dynamics
If a question concerning the dynamics of a scientific mosaic is missing, please add it here.
Related Topics
This term is also related to the following topic(s):
References
- ^ Rawleigh, William. (2022) Reconceiving Scientific Mosaics: A New Formalization for Theoretical Scientonomy. In Barseghyan et al. (Eds.) (2022), 83-103.
