Paradigm shifts tend to be most dramatic in sciences that appear to be stable and mature, as in physics at the end of the 19th century. When they are successful they lead to large scale changes in the scientific worldview. Revolutionary science is usually unsuccessful, and only rarely leads to new paradigms. "Thinking outside the box" would be what Kuhn calls revolutionary science. The box encompasses the thinking of normal science and thus the box is analogous with paradigm. Thinking inside the box is analogous with normal science. Simple common analogy: A simplified analogy for paradigm is a habit of reasoning or, the box in the commonly used phrase "thinking outside the box". Michel Foucault used the terms episteme and discourse, mathesis and taxinomia, for aspects of a "paradigm" in Kuhn's original sense. A new paradigm which replaces an old paradigm is not necessarily better, because the criteria of judgement depend on the paradigm.Ī more disparaging term groupthink, and the term mindset, have very similar meanings that apply to smaller and larger scale examples of disciplined thought. One important aspect of Kuhn's paradigms is that the paradigms are incommensurable, which means that two paradigms can not be compared to each other. For example, an experiment to test for the mass of the neutrino or decay of the proton (small departures from the model) would be more likely to receive money than experiments to look for the violation of the conservation of momentum, or ways to engineer reverse time travel. The scientific method would allow for orthodox scientific investigations of many phenomena which might contradict or disprove the standard model however grant funding would be more difficult to obtain for such experiments, in proportion to the amount of departure from accepted standard model theory which the experiment would test for. The prevailing paradigm often represents a more specific way of viewing reality, or limitations on acceptable programs for future research, than the much more general scientific method.Īn example of a currently accepted paradigm would be the standard model of physics. Thus, within normal science, the paradigm is the set of exemplary experiments that are likely to be copied or emulated.
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