![]() Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its paradigms and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn’s analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler, solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. There are several examples Kuhn uses to illustrate these paradigm shifts. A new paradigm may be more complete, or simpler, or more useful for answering certain questions compared to the preceding one, but it is not, strictly speaking and on the whole, objectively better. One drastic consequence of incommensurability is that there isn’t any such thing as absolute progress from one paradigm to the next - say from before the Copernican Revolution to after, or from classical physics to quantum physics. Kuhn particularly held that scientific theories from before and after a scientific revolution cannot be compared in a straightforward way they are “incommensurable,” because the meanings of familiar terms change in unexpected ways as scientists go from one mode of description to another. The terms themselves in science would change that complicate the method of comparing scientific theories and evidence between these different paradigms. Between the Ptolemaic method of understanding the orbits of planets and the modern ways astronomers use (borrowing ideas from Copernicus and other scientific revolutionaries), we need to pay close attention to the assumptions and arguments that lead to our conclusions. A paradigm shift occurs when a new set of assumptions and values replaces the previous one within a given scientific community. ![]() In the work, he presented arguments from the history and philosophy of science to show how science undergoes paradigm shifts. Kuhn’s opus The Structure of Scientific Revolutions catapulted him to stardom in the world of philosophy. In this post, I hope to discuss the nature of Kuhn’s paradigm shifts and their relevance in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Looks like the scientists at the NIH aren’t completely aloof to the philosophical underpinnings of science. In the middle of the top shelf sat philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Anyone could take a book and leave one for others to read. I stared at it in disbelief took the headphones out of my ears. As I walked through one of the building’s of the National Institutes of Health, I listened to music to drain out the sounds of the world. I could barely find answers questions and concerns I wrestled with as a scientist. I began to slowly and steadily believe that my work as a scientist wouldn’t be valued nor would it be worth doing in any sense. My questions about the nature of existence and science itself have left me disillusioned and detached from many aspects of my day-to-day routine. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.” - Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions My doubts have been getting to me. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity" we must account for subjective perspectives as well, all objective conclusions being ultimately founded upon subjective conditioning/worldview.“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922 – 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift", which has since become an English-language staple.
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