Modification talk:Sciento-2018-0003

From Encyclopedia of Scientonomy
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Commenting on this modification is closed; the modification is accepted.


Hakob Barseghyan

68 months ago
Score 0

This suggested modification seems rather obvious to me. After all, the whole point of adding questions to the ontology of epistemic elements was that we can legitimately speak of a question being accepted by a certain agent at a certain time. For instance, we want to say "the question of the mechanism of evolution is currently accepted by biologists", or "the question of the properties of phlogiston is not accepted by contemporary chemists as a legitimate topic of inquiry", etc. To make this possible, we need to accept that questions can be accepted or unaccepted.

My verdict: accept.
Permalink

Paul Patton

67 months ago
Score 0

What does question unacceptance mean? Does it mean that the question is deemed an illegitimate topic of inquiry? Or simply that no community consensus exists regarding the legitimacy of the question? Hakob's example of the question of phlogiston's properties is clearly an example of what would be deemed an illegitimate question by modern scientific communities. But what about questions where no consensus has been reached? How do we distinguish these two sorts of situation (i.e. a situation where no consensus exists from a situation where a consensus exists that a question is illegitimate). Perhaps we should take question unacceptance to refer to any situation other than question acceptance. In this case we would need to distinguish lack of consensus from consensus regarding illegitimacy in some other way, maybe by introducing a stance of question scientificity. Provided this ambiguity is somehow addressed, I'm inclined towards accepting this definition as the best available one.

My verdict: accept (with reservations needing to be addressed)
Permalink

Hakob Barseghyan

67 months ago
Score 0

Paul's comment raises an important question which can be also applied to other epistemic stances, specifically theory acceptance. Just as question acceptance, theory acceptance too seems to allow for three values:

  • (clearly) accepted;
  • (clearly) unaccepted;
  • no consensus.
I think, this should be formulated as an open question, something along these lines: are all epistemic stances binary, or do they allow for more than two values? This is related but is not identical to another question formulated by Paul a while ago, that of Conclusive Theory Assessment. This warrants a separate discussion and a separate paper tackling the issue.
Permalink

You are not allowed to post comments.

Retrieved from "https://www.scientowiki.com/index.php?title=Modification_talk:Sciento-2018-0003&oldid=14482"