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A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn .
The paradigm shift does not merely involve the revision or transformation of an individual theory, it changes the way terminology is defined, how the scientists in that field view their subject, and, perhaps most significantly, what questions are regarded as valid, and what rules are used to determine the truth of a particular theory.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a paradigm as "a pattern or model, an exemplar; a typical instance of something, an example". [11] The historian of science Thomas Kuhn gave the word its contemporary meaning when he adopted the word to refer to the set of concepts and practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular period of time.
The birth of modern medicine was not a common-sense move towards seeing what already existed, but actually was a paradigm shift in the intellectual structures for the production of knowledge, which made clinical medicine a new way of thinking about the body and illness, disease and medicine:
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/ k uː n /; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
[1] NIH also has a Transformative Research Projects Program - R01. Within the European Research Council , the term is 'frontier research.' National Science Foundation (NSF's) National Science Board defined transformative research as "research that has the capacity to revolutionize existing fields, create new sub-fields, cause paradigm shifts ...
There are many philosophical and historical theories as to how scientific consensus changes over time. Because the history of scientific change is extremely complicated, and because there is a tendency to project "winners" and "losers" onto the past in relation to the current scientific consensus, it is very difficult to come up with accurate and rigorous models for scientific change. [17]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the scientific method: . Scientific method – body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge.