Paradigm Shift
Also known as: Kuhnian Revolution
Kuhn's account of science as alternating periods of normal science and revolutionary change.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) argued against the gradual accumulationist picture of scientific progress, presenting science as alternating between periods of 'normal science' (puzzle-solving within an established paradigm — a comprehensive framework of theory, methods, examples, and standards shared by a scientific community) and periods of crisis and revolutionary change in which an accumulating set of anomalies that cannot be resolved within the prevailing paradigm leads to a fundamental restructuring of the field's framework. The shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, from phlogiston to oxygen chemistry, from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, and from classical to quantum mechanics are Kuhn's canonical examples. Critically, Kuhn argued that competing paradigms are 'incommensurable' — they may use the same words ('mass', 'space', 'planet') with substantively different meanings, and there is no neutral observation language by which to compare them. The Postscript to the second edition (1969) and Kuhn's later work substantially refined and clarified his concepts in response to critiques. The book substantially shaped subsequent philosophy of science (Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan responded directly), reshaped historiography of science, and gave the wider culture the term 'paradigm shift' for any fundamental conceptual change — usually applied much more loosely than Kuhn intended.
Core components
- Normal science (puzzle-solving within paradigm)
- Paradigm (theory + methods + examples + standards + community)
- Anomalies (puzzles that resist solution)
- Crisis and revolutionary change
- Paradigm shift (revolutionary change in framework)
- Incommensurability (competing paradigms have no neutral observation language)
- Exemplars (concrete problem-solutions that train scientists)
- Distinction from Popperian falsificationism (paradigms aren't simply abandoned on first refuting evidence)
- Pre-paradigm (immature science before unification)
Primary use case
Philosophy of science and history of science; foundation for substantial subsequent work in sociology of scientific knowledge (Bloor, Latour); reframing of how scientific change actually occurs; teaching framework in philosophy of science; widely (and often loosely) applied vocabulary in business and culture for fundamental conceptual change; basis for arguments about discipline-bound limits of inquiry.
Common criticisms
- Strong incommensurability claim has been substantially contested — successful translation between paradigms is possible in many cases, and Kuhn himself softened the claim in later work
- charge of relativism: if paradigm changes are not driven by accumulating evidence, in what sense is science progressive? (Kuhn's answers were not universally satisfying)
- 'paradigm' is used in many incompatible senses across the book — Margaret Masterman's 1970 paper identified 21 uses
- popular adoption has substantially diluted the concept, with 'paradigm shift' applied to any moderate change
- Kuhn's account works better for some sciences (physics, chemistry at scale) than others (biology, where multiple paradigms often coexist)
- the model is empirically grounded in selected historical cases that some historians of science have argued were retrospectively shaped to fit
- tension between Kuhn's descriptive account and any normative philosophy of science.
Lineage
- Siblings
- Falsificationism, Lakatosian Research Programmes