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Record W2915610042 · doi:10.33137/js.v2i0.31275

Scientificity and The Law of Theory Demarcation

2018· article· en· W2915610042 on OpenAlex
Ameer Sarwar, Patrick Fraser

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueScientonomy Journal for the Science of Science · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPseudoscienceEpistemologySkepticismAxiomPhilosophy of scienceScientific lawPhilosophySociologyMathematicsMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The demarcation between science and non-science seems to play an important role in the process of scientific change, as theories regularly transition from being considered scientific to being considered unscientific and vice versa. However, theoretical scientonomy is yet to shed light on this process. The goal of this paper is to tackle the problem of demarcation from the scientonomic perspective. Specifically, we introduce scientificity as a distinct epistemic stance that an agent can take towards a theory. We contend that changes in this stance are to be traced and explained by scientonomy. Thus, we formulate a new law of theory demarcation to account for changes in scientificity within the scientonomic framework.
 
 Suggested Modifications
 [Sciento-2018-0013]: Accept scientificity as a distinct epistemic stance that epistemic agents can take towards theories.
 Also accept the following questions as legitimate topics of scientonomic inquiry:
 
 Scientificity: How should scientificity be defined?
 Scientificity of Methods: Can the epistemic stance of scientificity be taken towards methods? Can there be unscientific or pseudoscientific methods?
 Scientificity of Questions: Can the epistemic stance of scientificity be taken towards questions? Can there be unscientific or pseudoscientific questions?
 
 
 [Sciento-2018-0014]: Accept the following law as a new scientonomic axiom:
 
 The Law of Theory Demarcation: if a theory satisfies the demarcation criteria of the method employed at the time, it becomes scientific; if it does not, it remains unscientific; if assessment is inconclusive, the theory’s status can become scientific, unscientific, or uncertain.
 
 Accept that the law of theory demarcation is not a tautology.
 Also accept the following questions as legitimate topics of scientonomic inquiry:
 
 Indicators of Theory Scientificity: What are the historical indicators of a theory’s scientificity? Can traditional indicators like textbooks, encyclopedias, conference proceedings, and journals be used to determine if evaluation by the demarcation criteria took place?
 Indicators of Conclusiveness for Scientificity Assessment: What are the historical indicators that an assessment by the demarcation criteria was conclusive or inconclusive? Does the lack of agreement or evidence count in favor of inconclusive assessment outcome?

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.028
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.271
Threshold uncertainty score0.988

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0280.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0140.285
Scholarly communication0.0010.002
Open science0.0030.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.049
GPT teacher head0.276
Teacher spread0.227 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it