Paradigms

Meaning of the term "Paradigm"

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