CONCEPT
Empirical Problems
Laudan's category for the external questions a theory tries to explain — what happens in the world — distinguished from conceptual problems, and answerable in principle through observation and controlled study.
Empirical problems are questions about the world that a theory or tradition is expected to address. Does this mechanism produce this outcome? Does this intervention cause this effect? Does this phenomenon occur under specified conditions? Empirical problems have answers that can, in principle, be investigated through observation, measurement, and controlled study. They are the problems most people mean when they talk about scientific progress — the phenomena that demand explanation and the explanations that compete to address them. But Laudan insisted that empirical problems are only half the picture. A tradition that handles its empirical problems brilliantly while failing its conceptual problems is not necessarily progressive, because conceptual incoherence eventually produces empirical failures the tradition cannot accommodate.
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The distinction between empirical and conceptual problems is one of Laudan's most practically consequential contributions. Prior to Laudan, the philosophy of science had tended to treat all problems as empirical — questions about the world that data could settle.