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|Prehistory=A number of philosophers of science addressed this the questionof method employment. [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Paul Feyerabend]], [[Dudley Shapere]], [[Larry Laudan]], and [[Ernan McMullin]] all suggested that our beliefs about the world shape our methods of theory evaluation.

Most noteworthy is [[Larry Laudan]]’s account of changes in drug trial methods. In his [[Laudan (1984)|''Science and Values'']], Laudan argued that the discovery of previously unaccounted effects (such as placebo effect or experimenter's bias) resulted in the formulation of new methods of drug testing.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984)|pp. 38-39]]

The same idea has been expressed around the same time by Ernan McMullin. In his account of the transition from the Aristotelian Medieval method to the hypothetico-deductive method in the early 18th century, McMullin shows that the employment of the hypothetico-deductivism was a result of accepting that the world is more complex than it appears in our observations.[[CiteRef::McMullin (1988)|pp. 32-34.]]

There have been many other attempts at explaining how methods of theory evaluation changecome to be employed by a community. Consider, for instance the reconstructions of Plato’s method performed by David Lindberg, [[Lindberg (2007)]] or the proposal of synchronous change in paradigm shifts by Thomas Kuhn.[[Kuhn (1962)]]