“Paradigm” on its own can have a number of meanings I think but the term “paradigm shift” is definitely out of Thomas Kuhn’s work on the history of science. His 1970 book “The structure of scientific revolutions” had a huge impact on me. My first entry about it in my Zotero hazards that I first read it in 1982, I feel it was earlier than that and I feel that I had already read it when I heard Popper speak when I was an undergraduate, which would have been 1975/6 I think.
Details #
Kuhn argued that “science” (I think he took that term as fairly self-explanatory which I now think was a bit of a cheat!) developed historically not in any linear progressioni but it sudden paradigm shifts and he divided sciences (ditto!) into pre-paradigmatic and paradigmatic based on whether, in his view, that science had reached a point of having a shared “paradigm”, a shared understanding of its field and of how to improve that understanding and had had a paradigm shift: a moment when that paradigm is abandonded and a new one replaces it. His paradigm (forgive me!) example was the “Copernican revolution”, the shift from seeing the universe as centred on the Earth to one centred on the son. (Actually, it’s a shift from seeing the solar system’s centre not the universe but as the solar system was all the pre-Copernican model was really a concentric globe solar system and outer globe of “the rest”, and as “solar system” is pretty much a post-Copernican term I’m simplifiying.)
His key argument, one very much against Popperian positivism, was that the new paradigm is not necesarily unequivocally better than the old one when these historical shifts happen, it’s more that the scientists working in the area see that the new one answers some of the problems with the old one and that it, crucially, seems to open up new questions and explorations.
I think that model, more a sociological and historical way of seeing “science” fits my experience of the world better than positivist models, logical positivist or empirical positivist. However, I have a strong sense that it works fairly well as a model of the “natural” or “physical sciences” but is much less convincing when looking at the human sciences. My take is that this relates to separation of world observed from world doing the observing in the nature/physical sciences, a separation that just isn’t there for us in the human sciences. Mind you, even for the human sciences, I think the history of changes in our models is more one of paradigm shifts as he described them, than of any positivist sequential development by falsification or simple accumulation of “evidence”.
I use “paradigm” particularly for the NHST: Null Hypothesis Significance Testing in statistics and as, often misused, in the human sciences as I think its introduction was a Kuhnian paradigm shift but also because I think we are overdue for a new paradigm shift to move us on from overvaluing it as a framework.
Try also #
Chapters #
Not covered in the OMbook though I guess the extent to which Jo-anne and hold a fairly Kuhnian view of things does run through the book!
Online resources #
Never going to happen!!
Dates #
First created 21.iii.25.
