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|History=The major flaw of [[Employed Method (Barseghyan-2015)|the previous definition of the term]] was that it defined method employment in terms of the ''indicators'' of method employment. The definition confused the actual phenomenon of method employment with scientonomic means of ''detecting'' method employment. This is unacceptable, since employed methods can, in principle, be detected in many different ways. For instance, the fact of a method’s employment can be detected by analyzing the record of transitions from one accepted theory to the next in a particular community at a particular time. Alternatively, we can try to infer the employed method of the time from our knowledge of the body of accepted theories using [[The Third Law|the third law]]. The previous definition of ''employed method'' equated method employment with one particular way of ''identifying'' method employment. According to the authors of the new definition:
<blockquote>"It is as though a type of subatomic particle were to be defined through the trace it leaves on a photographic plate, despite the fact that it can also be detected in other ways, such as with a bubble chamber or cloud chamber. Evidently, the fundamental attributes of a particle are one thing (i.e. mass, spin, electric charge, etc.), while the means that we currently use to detect the particle and its attributes is another. The two clearly don’t coincide because a particle can be detected using many different techniques (e.g. by photographic plate, bubble chamber, cloud chamber, etc.)."</blockquote>[[CiteRef::Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017)|p. 35]] </blockquote>
Similarly, the phenomenon of method employment should not be confused with the means of its identification. Thus, the previous definition of employed method was deficient and a new definition was needed.

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