THE PARADIGM SHIFT

from "The Aquarian Conspiracy"

by

Marilyn Ferguson (1980/87 pp 26-28)

 

1. New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding--great leaps, sudden liberation from old limits. We discovered the uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems  flat, the sun only seems  to circle the earth, matter only seems  solid. We learned to communicate, fly, explore.

 

2. Each of these discoveries is properly described as a "paradigm shift," a term introduced by Thomas Kuhn, a science historian and philosopher, in his landmark 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Kuhn's ideas are enormously helpful, not only because they help us understand how a new perspective emerges but also how and why such new views are invariably resisted for a time.

 

A paradigm is a framework of thought (from the Greek paradigma, "pattern"). A paradigm is a scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality.

 

Although Kuhn was writing about science, the term has been widely adopted. People speak of educational paradigms, paradigms for city planning, the paradigm shift in medicine, and so on.

 

3. A paradigm shift is a distinctly new way of thinking about old problems.

 

For example, for more than two centuries, leading thinkers assumed that Isaac Newton's paradigm, his description of predictable mechanical forces, would finally explain everything in terms of trajectories, gravity, force. It would close in on the final secrets of a "clock work universe."  But as scientists worked toward the elusive ultimate answers, bits of data here and there refused to fit into Newton's scheme.

 

4. This is typical of any paradigm

 

• too many puzzling observations pile up outside the old framework of explanation and strain it.

 

• Usually at the point of crisis, someone has a great heretical idea.

 

• A powerful new insight explains the apparent contradictions.

 

• It introduces a new principle  . . . a new perspective.

 

By forcing a more comprehensive theory, the crisis is not destructive but instructive.

 

5. A new paradigm

 

•  involves a principle that was present all along but unknown to us.

 

• includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of How Things Work, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well.

 

• transforms traditional knowledge and the stubborn new observations, reconciling their apparent contradictions.

 

6.  The new framework (paradigm) does more than the old. It predicts more accurately. And it throws open doors and windows for new exploration.

 

7. Given the superior power and scope of the new idea, we might expect it to prevail rather quickly, but that almost never happens.  The problem is that you can't embrace the new paradigm unless you let go of the old.

 

You can't be halfhearted, making the change bit by bit."

 

Like the gestalt switch," Kuhn said, "it must occur all at once." The new paradigm is not "figured out" but suddenly seen.

 

8. New paradigms are nearly always received with coolness, even mockery and hostility.  Their discoveries are attacked for their heresy.(For historic examples, consider Copernicus, Galileo, Pasteur, Mesmer.) The idea may appear bizarre, even fuzzy, at first because the discoverer made an intuitive leap and does not have all the data in place yet.

 

9. The new perspective demands such a switch that established scientists are rarely converted. As Kuhn pointed out, those who worked fruitfully in the old view are emotionally and habitually attached to it. They usually go to their graves with their faith unshaken. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, they stubbornly stick with the wrong but familiar.

 

10. But the new paradigm gains ascendance.

 

• A new generation recognizes its power.

 

When a critical number of thinkers has accepted the new idea, a collective paradigm shift has occurred. Enough people have caught on to the new perspective, or have grown up with it, to form a consensus.

 

• After a time that paradigm, too, is troubled by contradictions;

 

another breakthrough occurs, and the process repeats itself. Thus science is continually breaking and enlarging its ideas.

 

11.  Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All  important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing. We have not fully recognized this process of leaping ahead, however, in part because textbooks tend to tame revolutions, whether cultural or scientific. They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not at all shocking.

 

12. In retrospect, because the bridge of explanation was laid out painstakingly in the years after the intuitive leap, the big ideas seem reasonable, even inevitable. We take them for grantedÑ but at first they sounded crazy.