The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) is Tautological (Pandey-2023)

This is an answer to the question Tautological Status of The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) that states "The first law suggested by Barseghyan in 2015 is tautological."

The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) is Tautological was formulated by Aayu Pandey in 2023.1

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

This theory has never been accepted.

Suggestions To Accept

Here are all the modifications where the acceptance of this theory has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2023-0003	Scientonomy	28 December 2023	Accept that the first law and its corollaries are tautologies. Also accept that the rejection theorems are tautologies.	Open

Question Answered

The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) is Tautological (Pandey-2023) is an attempt to answer the following question: Is the first law suggested by Barseghyan in 2015 a tautology?

See Tautological Status of The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) for more details.

Description

Pandey provides the following summary of the argument:

I then discussed a number of scenarios of theory replacement allowed by the first law, such as the replacement by negation, the replacement by an answer to a different question, the replacement that involves the rejection of the question, and the replacement by a higher-order proposition. The only scenario, I argued, that the first law forbids is that of the rejection without any replacement whatsoever, as in the cases of element decay. The very existence of the phenomenon of element decay, therefore, poses a problem for the first law: if element decay is forbidden by the first law, then does this imply that the first law has been falsified? This brought us to our dilemma: either (1) exclude the cases of rejection without replacement from the scope of scientonomy and admit that the first law is a tautology or (2) include the cases of rejection without replacement into the scope of scientonomy and admit that such cases present a serious anomaly for the first law.

My solution was to opt for the first option, as it seemed to be the lesser of two evils. In support of this option, I indicated how the procedure of limiting the scope is ubiquitous in many other fields of inquiry; thus, there is nothing inherently vicious in excluding certain non-epistemic phenomena (such as element decay) from the scope of our discipline. I also drew parallels between the scientonomic first law and Newton’s first law: while the latter too has been considered tautological, not many have thought that it is necessarily a serious problem. Thus, the tautological nature of our first law is not inevitably problematic. It is still unclear at this stage whether this should prompt scientonomers to consider alternatives to the first law.1p. 43

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