Changes

|History=[[The Second Law (Barseghyan-2015)|The previous formulation of the second law]], originally proposed by Barseghyan in [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']],[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 129]] didn't specify the causal relations between ''theory assessment outcomes'' and the ''actual acceptance or non-acceptance of a theory''. All it accomplished is stating that a theory is assessed by the method employed at the time. This is a flaw, as any law of theory acceptance should specify what exactly happens to a theory in terms of its acceptance/unacceptance when an assessment outcome obtains.

In short, a new formulation of the second law was required that would fix these flaws. Thus, a new formulation was proposed which explicitly stated causal relationships between different theory assessment outcomes and actual cases of theory acceptance/unacceptance. By forbidding a number of logically possible combinations (e.g. Satisfied → Not Accept), this formulation made it clear that the law is ''not'' a tautology.