ABSTRACT
The term conceptual change was introduced by Thomas Kuhn (1962) to indicate that the concepts embedded in a scientifi c theory change their meaning when the theory (paradigm) changes.1 Kuhn promoted a contextual view of concepts as having an internal structure embedded in theoretical frameworks from which they obtain their meaning. When a theoretical framework changes, the meanings of the concepts subsumed in it also changes, making them ‘incommensurable’ to the same concepts subsumed under the previous theoretical framework.2 The notion of incommensurability received considerable criticism from philosophers and historians of science, forcing Kuhn to eventually change his position from that of ‘global incommensurability’ to ‘local incommensurability’. Local incommensurability refers to only a partial change in the meaning of concepts.
