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|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 (17392000)|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 (19761970)|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 (19771977a)|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 (19771977a)|p. 128]]