Epistemic Agent Can Rely on Epistemic Tools (Patton-2019)

This is a theory that states "An epistemic agent can rely on any number of epistemic tools, while an epistemic tool can be relied on by one-to-many agent."

Epistemic Agent Can Rely on Epistemic Tools was formulated by Paul Patton in 2019.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available answer to the question.

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of Epistemic Agent Can Rely on Epistemic Tools (Patton-2019):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	23 February 2024	The association became accepted as a result of the acceptance of the respective modification.	Yes

Suggestions To Accept

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

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Date Assessed	Verdict	Verdict Rationale
Sciento-2019-0018	Scientonomy	26 December 2019	Accept that the relationship of tool reliance can obtain between epistemic agents and epistemic tools. Also accept the definition of tool reliance, which states that an epistemic agent is said to rely on an epistemic tool when there is a procedure through which the tool can provide an acceptable source of knowledge for answering some question under the employed method of that agent.	23 February 2024	Accepted	The modification was discussed during the 2024 workshop. Firstly, the similarity between this definition and the recently accepted modification suggesting a definition of epistemic tool was highlighted by the community as an indicator that this modification might require further work to separate out its definitional content from dynamics content before it could be accepted. However, most of the discussion surrounding the modification concerned, as Jamie Shaw put it, whether the distinction between authority delegation and tool reliance was a distinction without a difference. Deivide Garcia suggested that there is a meaningful difference between the two: epistemic tools are inherently passive, whereas epistemic agents inherently play an active role both in tool reliance and in authority delegation. Paul Patton highlighted several examples of “troubleshooting” epistemic tools in the history of science, which is suggestive of a relationship between the epistemic agent and the epistemic tool that differs significantly from the relationship between two epistemic agents in an authority delegation relation. Yet, Hakob Barseghyan highlighted that the process of troubleshooting of tools could be conceptualized in different terms very similar to how scientonomers already describe authority delegation relations. Joshua Allen suggested that the modification would be useful to accept anticipating further work being done on the relationship between epistemic tools and epistemic actions. Ultimately, after most participants agreed that the modification was useful in its current state, the modification was accepted with over 2/3rds majority (11 votes to accept, 4 votes to keep the modification open).

Questions Answered

Epistemic Agent Can Rely on Epistemic Tools (Patton-2019) is an attempt to answer the following questions: Associations of Epistemic Agent and Associations of Epistemic Tool.

Reasons

No reasons are indicated for this theory.

If a reason supporting this theory is missing, please add it here.