Theory Pursuit

What does it mean to say that a theory is pursued? How should theory pursuit be defined?

By reviewing the history of science, one can find that not all theories that interested scientists were accepted. For example, many physicists are currently pursuing some forms of the string theory, but the string theory is not accepted as the best available theory by the scientific community. 1p. 40 It is also obvious that pursed and accepted theories were not well-distinguished by philosophers of science in the past; confusion between the three terms leads to serious misunderstanding. However, since one of the focuses in the TSC is scientific change, which deals exclusively with accepted theories, in order to explain the transition of accepted theories and to make sure that we can focus on discussing accepted theories only, it became increasingly important to distinguish different types of theories in terms of their acceptance status in the scientific community 1p. 30.

In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Hakob Barseghyan in 2015. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community. There is currently no accepted answer to this question in Scientonomy.

Broader History

The earliest attempt to distinguish acceptance and pursuit can be traced back to David Hume. In his book A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume discussed the distinction between believing and entertaining . The concept of believing can be seen as accepting certain theories while entertaining means trying to pursue certain potentially valuable theories without believing or accepting them.2p. 83

The distinction is first explicitly introduced by Imre Lakatos in his Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In the article, he came up with criteria that determine which competing theory is better. This is a clear indication that Lakatos distinguished accepted theories and pursued theories, because it is impossible for theories to be competitive if all theories are equally accepted. Moreover, Lakatos made the concept of pursuing theories even clearer by describing the progress of scientific knowledge as pursuing new facts to fit “phantasies” that scientists came up beforehand.3p. 47

The distinction is also explicitly introduced by Larry Laudan in his Progress and its Problems, as he states that there are two contexts of theories and research traditions, which are the context of acceptance and the context of pursuit.4pp. 108-114 When discussing pursuing theories, Laudan brought up the idea of “competing theories”, which suggests that Laudan does not see theories as final truths of the world.4p. 128

Stephen Wykstra also noticed the distinction as presented in his article Toward a Historical Meta-Method for Assessing Normative Methodologies: Rationability, Serendipity, and the Robinson Crusoe Fallacy, where he made a clear distinction between accepted theories and pursed theories.5p. 216 In his work, pursuing theories is closely related to the notion of testing scientific hypothesis.5p. 218

Scientonomic History

In the context of scientonomy, the distinction between accepted, used and pursued theories is discussed by Hakob Barseghyan. He argued that people constantly misuse these terms and it is necessary to make them unambiguous and thus formulated the concept of pursued theories.

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 January 2016		Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Theory Pursuit (Barseghyan-2015)	A theory is said to be pursued if it is considered worthy of further development.	2015

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Accepted Theories

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

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Theory Pursuit (Barseghyan-2015)	1 January 2016

Suggested Modifications

According to our records, there have been no suggested modifications on this topic.

Current View

At the moment, the term has no accepted definition in Scientonomy.

Related Topics

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

• Theory Use
• Theory Acceptance
• Theory