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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 cites, as an example, that Alexis Clairaut, in 1750, was able to account accurately for the precession of the Moon's orbit using Newtonian theory, after sixty years of failed attempts. [15] It is almost impossible to predict whether the anomalies in a candidate for a new paradigm will eventually be resolved.
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.
In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if ...
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.
In the philosophy of science, observations are said to be "theory-laden" when they are affected by the theoretical presuppositions held by the investigator. The thesis of theory-ladenness is most strongly associated with the late 1950s and early 1960s work of Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, and was probably first put forth (at least implicitly) by Pierre Duhem about ...
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 ...
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend both independently introduced the idea of incommensurability to the philosophy of science. In both cases, the concept came from mathematics; in its original sense, it is defined as the absence of a common unit of measurement that would allow a direct and exact measurement of two variables, such as the prediction of the diagonal of a square from the ...