Scientific paradigms

Thomas Kuhn, in an influential work on the history of science entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [knhntTO], used the phrase paradigm shift to describe the essence of what happens when one established way of looking at the world is - either suddenly, or over time - replaced by another. 

After some years or decades, a period of normal science ends in what Kuhn calls a crisis . The result of such a crisis is, in many cases, another scientific revolution. That revolution is characterized by a change of a paradigm. 

Figure 5. Paradigm of energy flow within the Antarctic marine ecosystem. (Reproduced with permission from reference 33 by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research of the International Council of Scientific Unions. Copyright 1987.)...

Every scientific discipline has its characteristic set of problems and systematic methods for obtaining their solution— that is, its paradigm. Chemical engineering is no exception. Since its birth in the last centmy, its fundamental intellectual model has undergone a series of dramatic changes. 

In one of the most influential books on the philosophy of science written in the 20th century, Thomas Kuhn described what happens when a prevailing scientific paradigm is on the verge of being replaced by an alternative theory.39 The precursor to a paradigm... 

His periodic system did not meet with universal approval. This comes as no great surprise today, such revolutionary ideas would be termed a "paradigm shift". Since the time of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, scientists had been to formulating scientific laws in eguations. After all, had James Clerk Maxwell in a stroke of genius not very convincingly demonstrated the... 

Despite its flexibility, the Army methodology can be described well in terms of referenced scientific estimation methods or correlations and in terms of recently developed paradigms. The Army s Preliminary Pollutant Limit Value (PPLV) concept (1,2,3), a decision tool, is being used and continually improved. 

Not all scientific statements are testable hypotheses, laws or theories. For example, scientific paradigms, by one definition (Masterman, 1970 Horgan, 1996), are organizing principles which encompass much of the work of ordinary science, in the language of Thomas Kuhn (1970) but are not necessarily testable. Ordinary science is not the source of revolutionary science (except, possibly when it breaks down) and is not hypothesis driven so much as driven by the requirement to fill in the holes opened in a field by the scientific paradigm. 

Monophyly, thus, might be a scientific paradigm. Indeed, Dennett seems to have a paradigm in mind when he tells his reader ... 

Hohn MJ, Park H-S, o Donoghue P, Schnitzbauer M, Soli D, Proc Natl Acad Sci US 103 18095 Jantsch E (1980) The Self-organizing Universe Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Pergamon Press, Oxford. 

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