The First Law for Methods (Barseghyan-2015)

This is an answer to the question Mechanism of Scientific Inertia for Methods that states "An employed method remains employed unless replaced by other methods."

The First Law for Methods was formulated by Hakob Barseghyan in 2015.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available answer to the question.

Broader History

This idea is not new to philosophers of science. For example, it is expressed in Kuhn (1970a): "scientists behave in the following ways; those modes of behaviour have… the following essential functions; in the absence of an alternative mode that would serve similar functions, scientists should behave essentially as they do if their concern is to improve scientific knowledge."2p. 237 This is similar to our formulation of The First Law for Methods (Barseghyan-2015), disregarding the normative piece ("scientists should behave").

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this theory:

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 January 2016	The law became de facto accepted by the community at that time together with the whole theory of scientific change.	Yes

Suggestions To Reject

These are all the modifications where the rejection of this theory has been suggested:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2023-0002	Scientonomy	28 December 2023	Accept new formulations of the first law for theories, norms, and questions that are in tune with the formulation of the first law. Also accept new formulations of the respective rejection theorems - theory rejection, norm rejection, and question rejection.	Open

Question Answered

The First Law for Methods (Barseghyan-2015) is an attempt to answer the following question: What makes the methods of an agent's mosaic continue to remain in the mosaic?

See Mechanism of Scientific Inertia for Methods for more details.

Description

Formulated for methods, the first law states that the implicit expectations employed in theory assessment will continue to be employed until they are replaced by some alternate expectations.

Just as is the case for The First Law for Theories (Barseghyan-2015), this law does not impose limitations on the sort of methods that can replace employed methods.1p. 125 However, importantly, "the community never remains with no expectations whatsoever. When facing a new theory, the community always has some implicit expectations concerning such theories. These expectations may be very specific or they may be very abstract and vague, but some expectations are always present, for otherwise no theory assessment would be possible."1p. 126

The gist of this theory can be illustrated by the following examples.

Possibilities for Method Replacement

Here are some possibilities for how method replacement by the first law might occur, as formulated by Barseghyan (2015):

In the most basic case, a community can reject some of the more specific requirements of its currently employed method and revert to a more abstract method. Alternatively, it can replace those rejected requirements with some new specific requirements. Suppose the employed method stipulates that a new theory must be tested in repeatable experiments and observations. In principle, the community may one day remove some of the ingredients of this method, say, the requirement of repeatability. As a result, the community can either revert to a more abstract method or it can introduce a new requirement to replace the repeatability clause. For instance, the community may revert to the more abstract method which stipulates a new theory must be tested in experiments and observations (no repeatability requirement). Alternatively, it can introduce a new requirement that in addition to empirical testing a new theory must also explain all the facts explained by the accepted theory. Which of these two scenarios materialize at each particular instance is decided by a number of contingent factors.1p. 125

Reasons

No reasons are indicated for this theory.

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Questions About This Theory

The following higher-order questions concerning this theory have been suggested:

• Tautological Status of The First Law for Methods (Barseghyan-2015)

If a question about this theory is missing, please add it here.