Paradigm shift

Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.

In the second sense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton's Principia, which, acting as a common model or an example... stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation.

[2]The nature of scientific revolutions has been studied by modern philosophy since Immanuel Kant used the phrase in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787).

Kuhn vehemently denies this interpretation[11] and states that when a scientific paradigm is replaced by a new one, albeit through a complex social process, the new one is always better, not just different.

However, the philosopher Donald Davidson published the highly regarded essay "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"[12] in 1974 arguing that the notion that any languages or theories could be incommensurable with one another was itself incoherent.

Furthermore, the hold of the Kuhnian analysis on social science has long been tenuous, with the wide application of multi-paradigmatic approaches in order to understand complex human behaviour.

More recently, paradigm shifts are also recognisable in applied sciences: The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought pattern—a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing: In a 2015 retrospective on Kuhn,[40] the philosopher Martin Cohen describes the notion of the paradigm shift as a kind of intellectual virus – spreading from hard science to social science and on to the arts and even everyday political rhetoric today.