Changes

The evolution of the drug trial methods is an example of the third law in action. For example, the discovery of the placebo effect in drug testing demonstrates that fake treatment can cause improvement in patient symptoms. As a result of its discovery the abstract requirement of “when assessing a drug’s efficacy, the possible placebo effect must be taken into account” was generated. This abstract requirement is, by definition, an accepted theory which stipulates that, if ignored, substantial doubt would be cast on any trial. As a result of this new theory, the Single-Blind Trial method was devised. The currently employed method in drug testing is the Double-Blind Trial, a method which specifies all of the abstract requirements of its predecessors. It is an apt illustration of how new methods are generated through the acceptance of new theories, as well as how new methods employ the abstract requirements of their predecessors.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 132-152]]

The third law does not stipulate how methods should go about specifying any new abstract requirement. The third law functions as a descriptive account of how methods change, and is not responsible for describing how methods ought to change. As such, it is an effective means of explicating the requirements of other employed methods. The Aristotelian-Medieval method is one such example of its utility.

There have been many other attempts at explicating the way in which methods change, such as the reconstructions of Plato’s method performed by [[David Lindberg]], or the proposal of synchronous change in paradigm shifts by [[Thomas Kuhn]].

|History=Barseghyan's formulation of the third law was the first attempt to address the problem of method employment in the scientonomic context.

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