[1]: 6 Philosopher Alex Michalos writes that "[t]he concept of acceptability is as ambiguous and troublesome as probability, confirmation, belief, justice, etc.
[2] Acceptability is a fundamental concept in numerous fields, including economics,[3] medicine,[4] linguistics,[5] and biometrics.
The idea of not increasing lifetime risk by more than one in a million has become commonplace in public health discourse and policy.
Stringent requirements of 1 in a million may not be technologically feasible or may be so prohibitively expensive as to render the risk-causing activity unsustainable, resulting in the optimal degree of intervention being a balance between risks vs. benefit.
Further investigation identifies options such as separating noninfectious from infectious wastes, or air pollution controls on a medical incinerator.
Various logic formulations of this principle have been developed, for example, that "a theory Δ is acceptable if for any wff α, Δ does not prove both α and ¬α",[11] and that "the acceptability of a proposition P in a system S depends on its coherence with the propositions in S".
[13] Hungarian mathematician Imre Lakatos developed a concept of acceptability "taken as a measure of the approximation to the truth".
[14] Despite such efforts to formulate parameters, acceptability "is a subjective construct that varies between users and in time".
[16] Philosopher David M. Godden, discussing when propositions may be acceptable to interlocutors in argument, characterizes the consensus among philosophers as follows: "[c]ommon knowledge generally provides good grounds for the acceptability of a claim, whereas popular opinion does not.