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|Question=What does it mean to say that a theory is '''pursued'''? How should ''theory pursuit'' be ''defined''?
|Topic Type=Definitional
|Description=TraditionallyBy 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 terms ''acceptancestring theory,'' ''use,'' but the string theory is not accepted as the best available theory by the scientific community. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 40]] It is also obvious that pursed and ''pursuit'' have accepted theories were not been well-distinguished. Confusion by philosophers of science in the past; confusion between the three terms leads to serious misunderstanding. However, thus their clarification since one of the focuses in the TSC is scientific change, which deals exclusively with accepted theories, in order to explain the transition of great importance. 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 [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 30]] Thus, distinguishing between these terms is of great importance.
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2015
|Prehistory=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.[[CiteRef::Hume (1739)|p. 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.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1976)|p. 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.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1977)|pp. 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.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1977)|p. 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.[[CiteRef::Wylstra (1980)|p. 216]] In his work, pursuing theories is closely related to the notion of testing scientific hypothesis.[[CiteRef::Wylstra (1980)|p. 218]]
|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.
|Related Topics=Theory, Theory Acceptance, Theory Use,
|Page Status=Needs Editing
