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|History=According to [[Employed Method (Barseghyan-2015)|the original scientonomic definition of the term]], suggested in 2015 and accepted in 2016, a method was said to be employed by a community if the community only accepted those theories whose acceptance was permitted by the method.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 53]] Thus, originally ''method employment'' was defined in terms of the ''indicators'' of method employment. This definition conflated the fact of method employment with scientonomic means of ''detecting'' method employment.
In 2017, [[Paul Patton]], [[Nicholas Overgaard]], and [[Hakob Barseghyan]] argued that this is unacceptable, for in principle employed methods can be detected in many different ways, e.g. by analyzing the record of transitions from one accepted theory to the next in a particular community at a particular time ''or'', alternatively, by infer the employed method of the time from our knowledge of the body of accepted theories using [[The Third Law|the third law]]and inferring the employed method from the theories accepted by the community at that time.
Consequently, [[Employed Method (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017)|a new definition of the term]] was suggested to distinguish the phenomenon of method employment from the ways and means of detecting it.[[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)]] By this definition, ''employed method'' is nothing but the actual expectations of a certain community at a certain time. This new definition is in tune with the usage of the term throughout Barseghyan's [[Barseghyan (2015)|''The Laws of Scientific Change'']]. For instance, he claims that the community of Aristotelian-Medieval natural philosophers employed the method of intuition schooled by experience in the sense that they ''expected'' new theories to be intuitively true.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 143-145]][[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]] Similarly, the double-blind trial method is currently employed in drug testing, in the sense that "the community expects new drugs to be tested in double-blind trials".[[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 134-142]]
