Against Conceptual Drift in Philosophy of Cosmology

This paper argues that Dark Energy or Modified Gravity? rests on a fundamental conceptual failure. Its guiding contrast is introduced as if it named two stable and commensurable explanatory options, yet the article itself progressively weakens, blurs, and destabilizes that very contrast through appeals to hybridization, reformulation, and theory-space flexibility. I argue that this is not a philosophical achievement but a methodological collapse. Hybrid cases do not abolish the need for category discipline, formal reformulations do not establish ontological equivalence, and local failures of demarcation do not justify global skepticism about the distinction itself. What the paper presents as epistemic sophistication is better understood as conceptual opportunism: a procedure in which unstable physical categories are first used to generate philosophical significance and then dissolved once the burden of precision becomes too great. The result is not a disciplined contribution to philosophy of cosmology, but a rhetorically polished form of category drift in which metatheoretical vocabulary substitutes for physical clarity.