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|Prehistory=The logic behind first law of scientific change is comparable to that behind Newton's first law of motion. It identifies a 'null case' in which no outside forces are acting and therefore, nothing changes.
The idea that scientific changes occur only when an alternative is available was not stated in the form of a law prior to Barseghyan's ''Laws of Scientific Change''[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)]], but the idea is implicit in past concepts of scientific change. Although Karl Popper stressed the importance of empirical falsification in his view of scientific theories, he did not believe a theory with falsifying instances should be abandoned unless a better substitute was available .[[CiteRef::Thornton (2016)]]. "In most cases", he wrote, "before falsifying a hypothesis we have another one up our sleeve".[[CiteRef::Popper (1959)]]
Thomas Kuhn wrote of paradigms,[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]], or later of a disciplinary matrix,[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1977a)]], as the set of shared commitments held by members of a scientific community, including theories, concepts, and methods. What Kuhn called normal science was the task of expanding the range of phenomena that could be explained in terms of the paradigm. He believed that this task seldom produced major novelties. The opportunity for fundamental change arose only during a crisis produced by the accumulation of anomalous findings that resisted explanation in the terms of the paradigm. Kuhn wrote that "falsification, though it surely occurs, does not happen with, or simply because of, the emergence of an anomaly or falsifying instance. Instead... it consists in the triumph of a new paradigm over the old one".[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)|p. 147]]
Lakatos similarly wrote that "Contrary to naive falsificationism, ''no experiment, experimental report, observation statement or well-corroborated low-level falsifying hypothesis alone can lead to falsification. There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory''" (Emphasis original).[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|p. 35]]
