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 were among the first who distinguished between the ''acceptance'' and the ''pursuit'' of a theory.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1977a)|pp. 108-114]] [[CiteRef::Wykstra (1980)|p. 216]] [[Hakob Barseghyan]] has argued that a similar distinction was implicit in the work of [[Imre Lakatos]], altough although Lakatos did not explicitly draw the distinction.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 33]]