Conceptual Progress in Science: Cognitive Enhancement and Pragmatic Optimization

This paper focuses on the nature of conceptual progress in science. Analyzing five historical episodes of conceptual progress in science, I will show that none of the existing philosophical theories of conceptual progress can make sense of all these cases. I will argue that this is because these theories try to capture conceptual progress as a single type of improvement. Instead, building upon recent cognitive science, I will propose a novel cognitive-pragmatic theory of conceptual progress that understands this phenomenon as involving two evaluative dimensions: cognitive enhancement and pragmatic optimization. While the former dimension assesses concepts in terms of their general cognitive utility, the latter assesses their optimization to the specific goals of the relevant scientific community. We will see that, thanks to these two dimensions, this theory is able to adequately characterize the diversity of conceptual progress exhibited by these historical episodes.