Paradigm shift,
sometimes known as extraordinary science
or revolutionary science, is the term
first used by
Thomas Kuhn in his influential
1962 book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
to describe a change in basic assumptions
within the ruling
theory of
science. It is in contrast to his idea
of
normal science.
It has since become
widely applied to many other realms of human
experience as well even though Kuhn himself
restricted the use of the term to the hard
sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is
what members of a scientific community, and
they alone, share.” (The Essential Tension,
1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held,
“a student in the humanities has constantly
before him a number of competing and
incommensurable solutions to these problems,
solutions that he must ultimately examine
for himself.” (The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions). A scientist, however, once a
paradigm shift is complete, is not allowed
the luxury, for example, of positing the
possibility that
miasma causes the flu or that
ether carries light in the same way that
a critic in the Humanities can choose to
adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for
instance, or select Marxism as an
explanation of economic behaviour. Thus,
paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them,
do not exist in Humanities or social
sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been
adopted since the 1960s and applied in
non-scientific contexts.
Although we
acknowledge Thomas Kuhn for inventing the
phrase, it is far too useful to remain
limited to the scientific confines for which
he intended it. For the purposes of this web
site, it is and shall be used to indicate
any significant shift in perception of the
human experience.
