Changes

|Prehistory=In the historical literature, many different words have been used to describe the attitudes a scientific community can take towards a theory, generally without any attempt to clarify their respective meanings. Attempts to draw distinctions between well-specified stances have occasionally been made. In the eighteenth century, [[David Hume]] distinguished between ''believing'' and ''entertaining'' a theory(although it is unclear if or how distinction is related to any of the contemporary distinctions). [[CiteRef::Hume (1739/40) |p. 83]] [[Larry Laudan]]and [[Stephen Wykstra]] similarly distinguished between the ''acceptance'' and the ''pursuit'' of a theory.[[CiteRef::Laudan (19771977a) |pp. 108-114]] and Stephen Wykstra [[CiteRef::Wykstra (1980) |p. 216]] similarly distinguished between the ''acceptance'' and the ''pursuit'' of a theory , and [[Hakob Barseghyan ]] has argued that a similar distinction was implicit in the work of [[Imre Lakatos]], altough Lakatos did not explicitly draw the distinction. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015) |p. 33]]