CONCEPT
Conceptual Problems
Laudan's category for internal tensions within a theoretical framework — contradictions the tradition's own commitments generate and cannot resolve without modification — distinguished from external empirical questions.
Conceptual problems are tensions that arise not from the world but from within the frameworks deployed to explain the world. They exist when a tradition's internal commitments generate contradictions that the tradition cannot resolve without modifying those commitments. Conceptual problems are not empirical questions waiting for more data. They are structural tensions within the tradition itself, and addressing them requires theoretical development rather than additional observation. Laudan's insistence that conceptual problems count toward the evaluation of a tradition's progressiveness was one of his most distinctive contributions. It meant that a tradition could be empirically adequate and still be degenerative, because conceptual incoherence eventually produces empirical failures the tradition cannot accommodate.
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The category became central in Laudan's later work as he traced how scientific controversies were actually resolved. In most cases, the resolution came not through a decisive empirical test but through the development of new theoretical resources that dissolved the conceptual tensions the earlier framework had generated. Maxwell's unification of