Changes

{{Definitional Topic

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

|Description=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. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 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 [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 30]].

|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 (2000)|p. 83]]

|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.

|Page Status=Needs Editing

|Editor Notes=Needs a prehistory and expanded description

|Accepted From Day=1

|Accepted From Approximate=No

|Still Accepted=Yes

|Accepted Until Approximate=No

}}