3/11/2023 0 Comments Kuhn paradigm shift![]() When evidence piles up that contradicts the paradigm, a science sometimes needs to go through the painful process of a paradigm shift. Scientific assumptions are never perfect mirrors of reality, though (“ all models are wrong but some are useful“). (Ethics alert: this account is shamelessly self-plagiarized from something I wrote a few years ago.)Ī Kuhnian paradigm is a set of assumptions that allows scientists in a particular field to avoid time-wasting arguments over the basics and spend their days solving small but useful puzzles. It was because they had found a paradigm within which to work. This wasn’t because they were any smarter than social scientists, Kuhn concluded. Physicists, in his experience, didn’t do that. Kuhn, a physicist turned philosopher of science, had spent a year in the late 1950s at the then-new Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and been struck by how the assembled psychologists, economists, historians, sociologists, and the like often disagreed over the very fundamentals of their disciplines. The idea of a paradigm shift comes from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is also, to be fair, something economists have been talking about for decades. That’s the argument of British money manager George Cooper‘s very interesting if less-than-felicitously titled new book, Money, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the Doctor of King Charles I Could Turn Economics Into a Science.
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