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The third law has also proven useful in explicating such requirements as Confirmed Novel Predictions (CNP). According to the Hypothetico-Deductive method, a theory which challenges our accepted ontology must provide CNP in order to become accepted. However, the history of CNP has been a point of confusion for some time. By the Third Law, one can show that the requirement of CNP has not always been expected of new theories. When Newton published his Principia, CNP were not a requirement of his professed method, yet they were still provided. On the other hand, Clark’s law of diminishing returns had no such predictions. This is because Newton’s proposal of unobservable entities, such as gravity and absolute space, challenged the accepted ontology of the time, while Clark’s simply accounted for the data already available. Thus, in utilizing the Third Law, one can discover both when certain criteria become an implicit rule and under what conditions they are necessary.

|Resource=Barseghyan (2015)

|Prehistory=The basic idea of ''the third law'' is not new. A number of philosophers have suggested that our beliefs about the world shape how we engage with the world. Different versions of this idea can be found in the works of [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Paul Feyerabend]], [[Dudley Shapere]], [[Larry Laudan]], and [[Ernan McMullin]].