There are anticipations of the principle theories-constructive theories distinction in the nineteenth-century electrodynamics literature, James Clerk Maxwell, in particular, being a source from which Einstein might well have drawn (see Harman 1998).
Though these are not examples Davidson explicitly appealed to, they fit the pattern that led to his introduction of the prior-theory/passing-theory distinction.
By Jonathan Schell The New Yorker, February 23 , 1981P. 27 In political theory, a distinction is often drawn between liberation (the overthrow of a repressive regime) and the establishment of liberty (the foundation of a lawful regime that respects the rights of its people).
Though in theory this distinction is easy enough to understand, in practice it is often difficult to distinguish strict from ceteris-paribus generalizations.
In systems theory, the distinction between the system and its environment, quasi embedding the system, is essential: the other systems also define something like an environment for the specific system (Easton 1965a, p. 24; Foerster 1984b, p. 4; Luhmann 1988a, p. 292; Willke 1989, p. 121).
In a discussion of the Sneed formalism of the structuralist school, he favored a theory-observation distinction that is relativized, first to a theory and second to an application of this theory (1976).
We have seen, moreover, that the formal accounts of theoretical terms work well with a theory-observation distinction that is relativized to a particular theory.
There is a simple, intuitive and influential proposal how to relativize the theory-observation distinction in a sensible way: a term t is theoretical with respect to a theory T, or for short, a T-term if and only if it is introduced by the theory T at a certain stage in the history of science.
This proposal draws the theory-observation distinction in an apparently sharp way by means of relativizing that distinction to a particular theory.
In theory, the distinctions between them were erased long ago.
nytimes.com/sports CITY ROOM: Us and the Lampposts In theory, the distinctions between New York City Transit's two private subways and its one municipal line were erased long ago.
