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Record W7117901990 · doi:10.33137/js.v6i.46704

Redefining Epistemic Stances

2025· article· en· W7117901990 on OpenAlex
Kye Palider, Hakob Barseghyan, Jamie Shaw

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 · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsUniversity of VictoriaUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNorm (philosophy)Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy)OntologyEpistemic virtuePhilosophy of scienceEncyclopedia

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Epistemic stances play a foundational role in scientonomy’s explanatory framework, yet several of their currently accepted definitions fail to capture the concepts they are intended to explicate. This paper undertakes a systematic reassessment of epistemic stances, motivated by a series of conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies that have emerged in recent theoretical and observational work. We begin by distinguishing epistemic stances understood as states from the transitions that initiate and terminate them, drawing on insights from formal ontology and related literatures. This distinction allows for a clearer formulation of scientonomic questions concerning the dynamics of scientific change. We then propose revised definitions of several core epistemic stances. In particular, we redefine theory acceptance in a way that permits suspension of judgment, multiple accepted answers, and theories answering multiple questions. We reconceptualize question acceptance as taking a question to be sound and introduce question answerability as a distinct epistemic stance. Norm employment is redefined as a dispositional state to act in accordance with a norm. Finally, we disambiguate norm rejection by differentiating transitions from norm acceptance to unacceptance and transitions from norm employment to unemployment; we suggest that the latter should be referred to as norm unemployment. We then outline corresponding revisions to scientonomic laws, theorems, and encyclopedia structure. Together, these revisions bring scientonomy’s explicit definitions of epistemic stances into closer alignment with our intuitive concepts and improve the coherence of our ontology.

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)0.011
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Scholarly communication
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: none
Teacher disagreement score0.764
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0110.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0130.056
Scholarly communication0.0010.003
Open science0.0040.000
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 head0.061
GPT teacher head0.298
Teacher spread0.237 · 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