Error

What is error? How should it be defined?

Scientists, historians, and philosophers customarily speak of scientific errors. When doing so, they may be referring to error in an absolute sense as judged by the standards of our current knowledge. For example, the claim that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe is now regarded as an error. 1 However, they may also be referring to some criterion of error related to the historical agent at the time. It is therefore important to have a proper definition of the term, and the meaning intended.

In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Paul Patton and Sarah Machado-Marques in 2019. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is:

• An epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method.

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 August 2021	This is when Machado-Marques and Patton's Scientific Error and Error Handling that offered a definition of the term was published. This is a good indication that the question of how the term is to be defined is considered legitimate by the community.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021)	An epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method.	2021

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021)	8 October 2021

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Date Assessed	Verdict	Verdict Rationale
Sciento-2021-0003	Scientonomy	1 August 2021	Accept the definition of error, stating that an epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method.	8 October 2021	Accepted	It was agreed that the definition "succeeds in capturing the gist of the notion by explicitly stating that an error is always relative to an epistemic agent and to that agent's employed method".c1 c2 The importance of the concept of error for the Tree of Knowledge project was also noted. Specifically, it was argued that "we must be able to differentiate between those theories which were accepted in accordance with an agent’s employed method and those which were not" so that we can better understand the reasoning underlying individual transitions.c3 Finally, it was suggested that a further distinction between “instances of honest error and misconduct” might be worth pursuing.c4

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021).

Error (Machado-Marques-Patton-2021) states: "An epistemic agent is said to commit an error if the agent accepts a theory that should not have been accepted given that agent’s employed method."

There are several different senses in which one might take the concept of scientific error. One is the absolute sense where some epsitmeic stances of actions of epistemic agents are are evaluated as erroneous from the present-day perspective. For instance, from our present perspective, we might judge the claim that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe as an error.1 However, as Machado-Marques and Patton argue, the sense of error that scientonomy should be interested in is not this absolute sense of error, but instead the local sense. Their definition takes the perspective of historical epistemic agents and qualifies an instance of theory acceptance as erroneous if the acceptance shouldn't have taken place given the agent's employed method.2 In this local sense, when a theory is erroneously accepted, the agent believes that it has satisfied the requirements of their employed method when, in fact, it has not. Such errors may be due to honest mistakes by the epistemic agent, or due to misconduct.2

Related Topics

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

• Mechanism of Theory Acceptance
• Mechanism of Theory Rejection
• Epistemic Agent
• Method