The word "paradigm" was originally one of those obscure academic terms
that has undergone many changes of meaning over the centuries. The
classical Greeks used it to refer to an original archetype or ideal.
Later it came to refer to a grammatical term. In the early 1960s
the Philosopher of Science
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
wrote a ground breaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
n which he showed that science does not progress in an orderly fashion
from lesser to greater truth, but rather remains fixated on a particular
dogma or explanation - a paradigm - which is only overthrown with great
difficulty and a new paradigm established. Thus the Copernican
system (the sun at the centre of the universe) overthrew the Ptolemaic
(the earth at the centre) one, and Newtonian physics was replaced by Relativity
and Quantum Physics.
Science thus consists of periods of conservativism ("Normal Science")
punctuated by periods of Revolutionary Science
Science and the Paradigm
Paradigm Links
The Paradigm - a broader perspective
Ways of Knowing
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