I would suggest Kuhn was misled by the Aristotle-Newton example where, indeed, the two approaches are incommensurate: What constitutes a reasonable explanation is simply different for the two men. While there have been major changes in the physical sciences since Newton, they do not reach the threshold needed to call them a paradigm shifts since they are all within the paradigm defined by the scientific method. Their epistemology was not based on careful observation. Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) would most likely have considered Galileo Galilei’s (1564 – 1642) careful experiments beneath him. While Aristotelian physics is broadly consistent with observation it is driven more by abstract concepts like perfection. Newton, himself, went further and claimed his results were derived from observation. Newtonian physics was driven by observation. In Newtonian physics there is no place for perfect motion but only rules to describe how objects actually behave. There is more here than a different description of motion the very concept of what is important has changed. This was not just a change in physics from the perfect motion is circular to an object either is at rest or moves at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force but a change in how knowledge is defined and acquired. The archetypal example, and I would suggest the only real example in the natural and physical sciences, is the paradigm shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. Perhaps it is just grandiosity, everyone thinking their latest idea is earth shaking (or paradigm shifting), but the idea has been so debased that almost any change is called a paradigm shift, down to level of changing the color of ones socks. A paradigm shift is when the entire structure of a field changes, not when someone simply uses a different mathematical formulation. Originally Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, used the word paradigm to refer to the set of practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular period of time. Paradigm and paradigm shift are so over used and misused that the world would benefit if they were simply banned.
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