Copernicus had what Kuhn would call just over 400 years later a crisis. Here’s the nitpicky footnote that points out some of the significant mistakes in the article:Ĭopernicus found numerous anomalies that science really couldn’t explain: retrograde motion, the fact that the sun wasn’t really rising, (it just looked that way) and why no one ever bothered to give either Aristotle or Ptolemy a first last name. Kuhn remains a bit fuzzy on the details here, e.g., What is an anomaly? How many anomalies? How significant? How long does it take? etc. For brevity, let’s just agree on “the way science is done.” ↩ Ok, “the way science is done” is shorthand for Kuhn’s longer discussion of normal science, puzzle solving, education of subsequent generations of scientists, recognition and identification of meaningful data, etc. ↩Ī quick internet search for “ transgender paradigm shift” turns up loads of hits. Įven the “nu metal band” Korn has an album named “ The Paradigm Shift.” As with more Korn music, it is an acquired taste. But let’s not slander Kuhn in the process. Saying “paradigm shift” sounds a lot better than “I was wrong,” so by all means let’s continue to use the term. It seems that Kuhn’s expression has drifted so far from his intended meaning that we should no longer attribute it to him. So a person who has failed to recognize, ignored, or misinterpreted evidence, and then realizes that mistake and adjusts accordingly, is simply admitting an error and correcting it. That, had Kuhn said anything about it, is simply a mistake. Now and then a sufficient number of anomalies are identified, which leads to the replacement of one paradigm by another, the “paradigm shift.” A paradigm shift does not occur when one scientist realizes that s/he had misinterpreted evidence and then reinterprets it in a new way, to demonstrate something different. They typically function for a long time, but there’s no way to predict how long any paradigm will reign supreme. There’s even a YouTube channel, Paradigm Shift that offers “leadership training.” So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see it applied to transgender: “ A Lifetime of Anomalies Explained by a New Transgender Paradigm.” This latest invocation of Kuhn’s celebrated phrase seems a rather tenuous application of the term.Īccording to Kuhn, paradigms are shared worldviews that structure the way science is done. Instead, they are bandied about to explain nearly any change, from economics and politics to sustainable public transportation and sanitation. The terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” quickly escaped the narrow confines of history and philosophy of science and are today rarely used to describe scientific change. A half century ago Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the way that science lurches unpredictably forward.
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