Paradigm Shifts
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) introduced “paradigm shift” to describe how science actually changes. Not gradually, through accumulating evidence, but through wholesale replacement of conceptual frameworks.
A paradigm is a shared way of seeing. It defines what questions are worth asking, what methods are legitimate, what counts as evidence, what anomalies can be ignored. Within a paradigm, scientists solve puzzles. Between paradigms, they can barely communicate.
Normal science works within a paradigm. The framework is assumed; researchers fill in details. Anomalies appear — results that don’t fit — but they’re explained away, attributed to experimental error, or set aside for later. The paradigm is too productive to abandon over scattered problems.
Anomalies accumulate. Eventually, the weight becomes unsustainable. Someone proposes a new framework that dissolves the anomalies. Resistance is fierce — careers were built on the old paradigm, and the new one requires relearning everything. The shift happens not through persuasion but through generational replacement. As Max Planck put it: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Phlogiston theory explained combustion: burning released phlogiston, an invisible substance in flammable materials. The theory worked for decades. But phlogiston had negative weight (metals gained weight when burned), and the theory grew epicycles. Lavoisier’s oxygen framework dissolved the anomalies. Phlogiston didn’t exist — but phlogiston scientists weren’t stupid. They were working within a paradigm that made phlogiston reasonable.
Continental drift waited fifty years. Wegener’s evidence was strong — matching coastlines, fossil distributions, geological formations. But the mechanism was missing (how could continents plow through ocean floor?), and geology was paradigmatically opposed to moving continents. Plate tectonics, with seafloor spreading, provided the mechanism. The same evidence that was dismissed became conclusive.
Germ theory replaced miasma theory. Diseases came from bad air; everyone knew this. Ignaz Semmelweis’s handwashing data was explained away. John Snow’s cholera map was ignored. Pasteur and Koch eventually won, but decades of doctors resisted — and patients died — while the paradigm shifted.
Kuhn argued that paradigm shifts aren’t purely rational. The new paradigm isn’t proven better by some neutral standard — it becomes dominant because it solves problems the old one couldn’t, because new practitioners adopt it, because the old guard retires.
This is uncomfortable. Science is supposed to follow evidence. But scientists are humans embedded in communities, with careers and identities tied to frameworks. The sociology of knowledge matters. Evidence alone doesn’t determine belief.
Paradigm shifts aren’t unique to science. Industries have paradigms — assumptions about how business works that become invisible. Retail’s paradigm was physical stores until Amazon forced a shift. Media’s paradigm was bundled distribution until the internet unbundled it.
The pattern: the dominant framework explains most cases, anomalies are dismissed, and then a disruption forces recognition that the framework was always limited.
The question for practitioners: what paradigm are you operating in? What anomalies are you explaining away? What would your field look like if you started from different assumptions?
You can’t think outside all paradigms — you’re always somewhere. But you can notice that you’re inside one.
Related: [[epistemology]], [[chestertons-fence]], [[emergence]], [[zeitgeist]]