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|Description=Historical indicators can be used as evidence to assess whether certain epistemic stances were taken by epistemic agents towards an elementepistemic elements. Sarwar and Fraser present ''scientificity'', a new epistemic stance that may be taken toward theories, and as such, in order to understand whether theories were considered to be as scientific or unscientific by a particular community, one must understand what the indicators of different assessment outcomes of scientificity are.[[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)]] In particular, it is unclear precisely when assessment of the demarcation criteria may be inconclusive.

Noting that the difficulty of finding historical indicators for conclusive assessments are likely to be more definitveof the demarcation criteria, Sarwar and Fraser state that "it is unclear whether indicators can be found to determine if evaluation by the demarcation criteria took place. This is mostly due to the fact that scientists may presumably keep track of only those theories that are accepted ... Thus, there is a legitimate question concerning the indicators of scientificity. Once this question is reasonably answered, one may also try to locate historical indicators that could tell us whether an assessment for scientificity was conclusive or inconclusive. It is conceivable that we may find solid indicators of conclusive assessments, while having trouble locating indicators of inconclusive assessments". [[CiteRef::Sarwar and Fraser (2018)|p. 62]] It is further postulated that if there is lack of evidence about the scientific status of a theory, this may itself indicate an inconclusive assessment outcome.