Meaning of 'Solution' [closed]

Solution 1:

I am quite confident it should be close to the second one in most scenarios. A solution is the correct answer to a problem. While an attempt to solution may or may not be correct. Consider these words/phrases: "method to solve", "finding a solution", "attempting a problem". You might get a reference.

In a small number of cases, the word has a context based meaning.

If a student says, "This is my solution to the given question." They are giving out their method to reach the 100% correct answer. The ultimate answer has been reached but the path taken may or may not be correct here.

When the student is not 100% confident even about the final answer they might say: "this is how I have solved the question." Or, "this is my attempt to find a solution to the question."

Solution 2:

A solution to a problem is like an answer to a question. It is simply an element of a pair. A solution may be true or false. It may be good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. It may be partial or even irrelevant.

There’s a famous quotation from H.L. Mencken: there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

However, as this page at Quote Investigator shows, many others have embraced the concept of a false solution: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/

It may be possible in a domain like arithmetic for there to be correct answers. Some things are genuinely provable in a strict formal sense, although even here this requires some acceptance of unprovable assertions. We can easily agree that 2+2=4, but the answer to “what is two?” is not so simple.

Outside of arithmetic, ordinary English is full of “problems and solutions”, like “How do solve a problem like Maria” (from The Sound of Music), or “The answer was an Orange”, which remains searchable as a phrase in Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That. Even here in our little world of EL&U, down-voting and complaints about down-voting suggest that opinions differ - and that some problems may in fact have no solution.

To bring this back to the original question: an “attempt” is probably the better of the two choices offered by the OP, because “attempt” itself may have be qualified, and terms like “insincere attempt” are more comprehensible than “insincere truth”.