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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.
Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition.
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.
Before diving into a historical overview of the scientific understanding of the planets, stars and other celestial bodies, Kuhn prefaces the main ideas in The Copernican Revolution (in Chapter 1) by arguing that the story of the shift from a geocentric understanding of the universe to a heliocentric one offers a great deal of insight far beyond ...
An example of a paradigm would be the geocentric model of the universe; an example of a paradigm shift would when the heliocentric model began taking over due to irrefutable evidence (largely from Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton). In Kuhn's model, these three would be revolutionary scientists, because they changed the model.
Created Date: 8/30/2012 4:52:52 PM
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn's landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) [11] introduced and popularized the idea of discontinuous change and the long-term effects of discontinuous change. Kuhn argued that progress in knowledge occurs at times through sudden jumps, which he called paradigm shifts.
Kuhn stressed that historically, the route to normal science could be a difficult one. Prior to the formation of a shared paradigm or research consensus, would-be scientists were reduced to the accumulation of random facts and unverified observations, in the manner recorded by Pliny the Elder or Francis Bacon, [4] while simultaneously beginning the foundations of their field from scratch ...