Kuhn tentative answer

1. The concept most clearly identified with Kuhn is ‘paradigm’, which has the sense of a ‘model’ or ‘pattern’. How does Kuhn apply this concept to the stages of growth of scientific knowledge?

For Kuhn, a paradigm is a scientific achievement that fulfills certain criteria. The achievement has to be unprecedented enough to attract attention, and open-ended enough to inspire further research. A new paradigm asks scientists to reconstruct prior assumptions and reevaluate previously held facts, and so it faces resistance. But when a paradigm shift does take place (i.e. people accept the new paradigm), “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] qualitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.” Kuhn argues that this paradigm change, where an older paradigm is replaced by a contradictory one, might be called a scientific revolution.