Conceptual Change and the Progress of Science

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter illustrates the conceptual change and the progress of science. Conceptual change is such a fundamental feature of the growth of scientific knowledge that it is sometimes hard to understand how it should ever have come to be a problem of special concern in the philosophy of science. It seems so natural to say that science makes progress through conceptual change, by refining, transforming, and inventing concepts, and by creating new languages along with new theories. The chapter focuses on “incommensurability.” Where a marked shift in the experimental background accompanies the transition to a new theory, the logical connections between the old and the new world-views will be harder to establish. Whether such shifts can be so disruptive as to preclude altogether translation and logical comparison remains an open question.