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Paradigm ShiftsT Nickles, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

ã 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by Thomas Nickles, volume 2, pp. 335–347, ã 1999, Elsevier Inc.

GlossaryConceptual framework or conceptual scheme A set of

basic categories, rules, and/or entrenched practices that

organize experience, thought, and action; a paradigm (in

one sense), a world view or a ‘take’ on a particular domain of

inquiry or activity.

Convergent versus divergent thinking Psychologist J. P.

Guilford’s distinction of routine thinking, constrained by a

set of norms or conventions, from unconventional,

imaginative activity that disregards established rules to strike

out in new directions. Convergent thinking raises standard

questions and produces orthodox answers, while divergent

thinking is iconoclastic, ‘outside the box.’ Brainstorming,

free association, and planning retreats are common ways of

generating divergent ideas.

Creative innovation A creative product, novel design, or

increase of fit to an environment that ‘sticks,’ that is accepted

and employed by a community.

Evolutionary change Slow, incremental change, as in

Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, in contrast to

revolutionary jumps and rapid structural reorganizations,

including paradigm shifts. A major issue is whether

evolutionary change alone is sufficient to produce genuinely

divergent outcomes.

Holism The doctrine that the whole is more than the sum or

aggregate of its parts in the sense that the functional relation

or structural organization of the parts determines the nature

of the whole; and the holistic significance of a part derives

from its relation to the other parts – from its place in the

organizational structure – rather than from its own intrinsic

nature. Holists deny that reductionist, analytic methods are

adequate to understand the emergence or transformation of

structures and phenomena in complex systems.

Incommensurable paradigms Thomas Kuhn’s claim that

there is no paradigm-neutral language and no neutral,

objective standard against which competing paradigms can

be compared. There is much disagreement about what

incommensurability is and whether it actually exists in the

history of the sciences and other disciplines.

Logic versus rhetoric An old dispute about how to conduct

serious inquiry. Logical thinking, in the strict sense, must be

clear and must conform to deductive or inductive inference

rules. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, is sensitive to

context, audience, and our embodiment as emotional

beings and makes use of nonlogical tropes or figures such as

analogy, metaphor, and simile. Thinkers such as Plato and

Descartes considered logic and mathematics to be

constitutive of rationality and criticized rhetoric as a

sophistical tool for undermining rational deliberation. By

contrast, many theorists today, including Kuhn, consider

rhetorical stretching of current modes of thought and

practice to be one key to creative imagination. The claim that

logical thinking is convergent while rhetorical thinking is

divergent is an oversimplification.

Paradigm A model, template, or matrix for making, doing,

or evaluating something. For Kuhn a paradigm in the small

sense is an ‘exemplar’ – a successful concrete problem

solution that serves as a model for further work in the

relevant, mature scientific community. A paradigm in the

large sense is a ‘disciplinary matrix’ – an entrenched point of

view and a corresponding set of practices that structure the

efforts of such a community to emulate its exemplars. Others

have extended the term to designate any organizing

framework, major policy, or set of constitutive rules of

operation, for example, as used in government or business.

Relativism The view that truth or correctness is relative to a

culture, conceptual framework, or individual and that there

is no objective way to resolve disagreements. What is true for

me may be false for you.

Selectionist models of creativity and innovation:

Undirected variation plus selective retention The type of

model discovered by Darwin and employed in his theory of

biological evolution. A mechanism of undirected or partially

‘blind’ variation is coupled to a process of selection of those

variants that happen to be favored by the selection criteria in

play (e.g., the biological environment) and further coupled

to a mechanism that transmits the favored features, to some

degree, to the next generation (e.g., genetic inheritance).

When the process is iterated over many cycles in an

environment with relatively stable selection pressures,

adaptive modification is almost inevitable. Today

selectionist mechanisms are widely applied in many fields

beyond biology, for example, to problem solving by

computer. Universal evolutionists assert that selectionist

209

210 Paradigm Shifts

models are the key to understanding all forms of creativity

and innovation, because something creative is basically a

novel design and only a selectionist process can explain how

more design can emerge from less.

Structuralism Originally the label applied to Ferdinand de

Saussure’s theory of language as a system of signs in which

the linguistic units themselves are arbitrary and get their

significance from their complex relations to the other

elements in the system. Claude Levi-Strauss and others

extended the idea to the social sciences, literature,

architecture, etc., contending that many everyday human

activities are explainable by postulating the existence of deep

structures that generate common patterns – cultural genetic

codes, so to speak. These deep structures are theorized to

vary from culture to culture and from one historical period

to another. Since the relations in question are typically

rigidly synchronic, critics argue that structuralists are

unhistorical and forced to postulate sharp breaks or ruptures

in order to handle dynamical change – a charge that has also

been leveled at Kuhn. Ontologically, structuralism takes

relations seriously: systems of relations among items at one

structural level of description constitute new, emergent

levels of reality. Today, complexity theorists study networks

and their sometimes-sudden transformations.

Paradigm Shifts as a Theory of Creativity

The physics-trained historian and philosopher of science

Thomas Kuhn popularized talk of paradigms and paradigms

shifts in his controversial 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions. Paradigm shifts in Kuhn’s technical sense are

scientific revolutions. In the everyday sense a paradigm is

a model or ideal, a standard of comparison, something to

be emulated. Like its near synonyms ‘archetype,’ ‘pattern,’

‘template,’ and ‘prototype,’ the word ‘paradigm’ is ambiguous,

designating either a particular, concrete item or something

more abstract and universal. A particular case may serve as a

‘paradigm case.’ An artwork or industrial prototype (a particu-

lar physical object) may serve as a model for replication. But a

paradigm can also be a general type, pattern, template, matrix,

or set of rules or specifications that the particular cases exem-

plify or embody. Since Kuhn regarded himself foremost as a

philosopher, this article will emphasize the philosophical

background and implications of Kuhn’s work, while touching

on contributions from other fields; and the focus will be on the

early work for which he is best known. After the 1960s Kuhn

took surprisingly little notice of the dramatic developments in

the cognitive and complexity sciences that might have helped

him articulate his position.

Kuhn employed several senses of ‘paradigm’ to describe and

explain the development of mature sciences, that is, sciences

such as physics (especially mechanics), chemistry, and evolu-

tionary biology. During most of its history, according to Kuhn,

the practitioners of such a science do ‘normal science,’ that is,

science defined and guided by a paradigm. Occasionally, how-

ever, a crisis develops and a revolutionary paradigm shift may

then occur. This ‘paradigm change’ language caught on in the

politically turbulent 1960s and 1970s and was eventually

uncritically extended to signify just about any major change

in a policy or practice. The entry ‘paradigm shift’ appears in

William Safire’s dictionaries of American politics, and talk

about ‘breaking the rules’ makes good advertising copy. There

also have been scientifically serious extensions of Kuhn’s work,

as in theories of the cognitive development of children by

Susan Carey and others. Among creativity theorists, Robert

Sternberg’s propulsion model (for example) extends Kuhnian

insights to cover the range of movements through design space.

On the other hand, those psychological and social theorists

who believed they could quickly transform their enterprises

into mature, progressive sciences simply by deciding to adopt a

paradigm had missed the point, Kuhn said.

The paradigm concept is important to studies of creativity at

the personal, community/institutional, theoretical, and policy

levels. Problem solving within a paradigm, according to Kuhn,

requires conservative, convergent thinking, which other ana-

lysts have considered to be routine and hence modestly crea-

tive at best; while paradigm change signals bold, divergent

thinking. Apparently, then, the best way to achieve creative

innovation is to be divergent rather than convergent. A related

view is that work within a paradigm is logical whereas para-

digm changes involve nonlogical, rule-breaking, rhetorical

moves. Some historically important thinkers and institutions

have held that rhetoric has no place at all in serious intellectual

enterprises. Kuhn challenged all of these received ideas.

Thomas Kuhn’s Account of Paradigms and ScientificCreativity

According to Kuhn, an enterprise becomes a mature scientific

discipline once it gains a paradigm that makes routine, consen-

sual problem formulation and problem solving possible. The

typical historical pattern of development of a mature science

(one that has already achieved its initial, discipline-defining

and unifying paradigm) is long periods of ‘normal science’

punctuated by occasional, short periods of ‘extraordinary

science,’ that is, crisis situations that in some cases result in

full-scale scientific revolutions. In those rare instances a new

paradigm displaces the old and subsequently underwrites a

new period of normal science strikingly different from the

old one. Normal scientific problems are so well defined and

highly constrained that Kuhn labeled them ‘puzzles,’ by anal-

ogy with crossword puzzles. The paradigm not only guarantees

that the puzzle is solvable but also points fairly precisely

toward its correct solution. Nonetheless, Kuhn insisted that

even normal science is creative in its way. Extending the reach

of the paradigm demands the best efforts of the brightest

people. This is not drudgework. Moreover, disciplined normal

science is essential in laying the groundwork for eventual crisis

and revolution, for it is normal science’s ability to focus on the

most esoteric details that eventually produces the anomalies

that resist all efforts to bring them into line with the paradigm;

whence a crises ensues.

Paradigm Shifts 211

Normal science involves highly convergent problem solv-

ing, whereas a revolution is so divergent that Kuhn introduced

the term ‘incommensurable’ to describe the relation of the new

paradigm (or lack thereof) to the old. The new paradigm

points the science in a new direction, and work under the

two paradigms is not mutually translatable. Since paradigms

carry with them their own goals and standards, up to a point,

scientists facing a revolutionary divide do not possess a single,

coherent set of standards for evaluating the competing claims

and practices. Kuhn emphasized that logic plus empirical data

are insufficient to determine paradigm choice. (This is the most

serious form of the so-called underdetermination problem.)

Accordingly, members of the competing paradigm commu-

nities often reject each other’s work as sloppy, out-of-date,

or misguided. (“That’s not the way to do good solid state

physics!”) Reliable signs of incommensurability are systematic

communication breakdowns and failures to agree on what is a

good problem and what counts as a solution. Lost is the “ease

and fullness of communication” among practitioners and their

“unanimity of agreement” over correct problem solutions –

harmonies normally guaranteed by work within a common

paradigm. Paradigm change is cultural change. A revolution

splits the once tightly bound community of specialists.

According to Kuhn, revolutionary paradigm changes,

although unpredictable, are inevitable, and we cannot expect

them to become milder as a field matures and becomes even

more tightly wound. This means that the growth of scientific

knowledge, that is, scientific progress and scientific creative

innovation, is not cumulative – a shocking conclusion that

Kuhn claimed to find in his historical research as well as in

his epistemological theory. Yesterday’s scientific successes may

be rejected or ignored today, and today’s heretics may become

tomorrow’s heroes. However, the winners typically rewrite

history to make the new paradigm appear to be the natural,

rational, objective successor to the old. That, Kuhn wrote, is

why paradigm shifts have been invisible to less historically

sensitive analysts. (Moreover, the losers often rewrite their

own history to make it seem to anticipate the change.) In

advancing his controversial model of scientific development,

Kuhn himself was attempting to overturn the old view of

science as converging on the final truth by using a routine,

scientific method. Most commentators agree that he succeeded

in his critical aims but remain skeptical of his positive model.

As regards creativity, then, Kuhn seems committed to two

varieties. The more modest sort of creativity involves working

within a guiding framework that defines the research enterprise

in that particular specialty area and thereby makes esoteric

research intelligible. The divergent sort generates a new defin-

ing framework that sends the field in a different direction.

Educational psychologists from J. P. Guilford on have often

operationally defined creativity as divergent thinking, as if

divergence is part of the very meaning of ‘creativity.’ This view

contains an important grain of truth; however, Kuhn largely

rejected the view that creativity requires divergent thinking –

although he would surely agree with psychologists such as

Sternberg and Simonton that normal and revolutionary

science feature different degrees of creativity. At least in mature,

normal science, Kuhn claimed, innovation is normally the

product of convergent thinking for the purpose of filling gaps

in, and extending, the established paradigm. By contrast, the

human sciences and philosophy are too undisciplined, too

divergent, to build consensual structures of theory and prac-

tice. They expend too much energy debating fundamental

questions. Kuhn’s paradox is that, in the mature sciences,

convergent research is the most efficient means to divergent

results. Convergent research is the fastest way to a revolution-

ary leap forward, since resistant anomalies can generate crisis

and revolution. So divergent and convergent thinking cannot

be decoupled in the way that some creativity experts have

claimed, at least not in the sciences.

Kuhn’s view also contrasts sharply with that of philosopher

of science Karl Popper, who argued that the way to speed up

scientific progress is to propose bold, conjectural hypotheses

and then to criticize them as severely as possible by attempting

to refute them. But to heed Popper’s call for scientific revolu-

tion in perpetuity would have precisely the opposite result,

Kuhn replied. It would destroy science as we know it. To

label something a revolution only makes sense against a back-

ground of disciplined stability, for revolutions destabilize the

constitutive framework that defines the activity in the first

place. Popper’s “critical approach to science and philosophy”

is precisely what mature science excludes. For Kuhn a mature

science is dogmatic. Mature, normal science shuns criticism

of fundamentals and even discourages major innovation as

disruptive.

It follows from Kuhn’s view that a mature field must also be

monolithic: it can possess only a one master paradigm at a

time. To be sure, subspecialists within a larger field will work

under their own smaller, specific paradigms, but these will

articulate pieces of the overarching paradigm. This is a quite

different situation from that found in the social and behavioral

sciences, in which a large field divides up into loosely

organized schools. Kuhn’s year spent interacting with eminent

social scientists at the Stanford Institute for Advanced Study

in the Behavioral Sciences convinced him that social scientists

are playing a very different game from that of physicists and

chemists. The social sciences, he observed, remain too close to

philosophy in inviting constant challenge to fundamentals.

Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos disagreed with Kuhn’s

monolithic claim, on both descriptive and normative grounds.

Historically, the mature sciences have featured major, long-

term research programs, he agreed, but usually two or three

simultaneously, engaged in a quasi-Popperian competition.

In this manner Lakatos attempted to strike a compromise

between Popper’s scattergun competition of isolated hypoth-

eses and Kuhn’s view that a single major research program

characterizes each mature discipline. Meanwhile, Paul Feyera-

bend rejected both Kuhn’s and Lakatos’s view as too conserva-

tive. He advocated a proliferation of divergent theoretical

claims (‘methodological anarchism’), on the ground that test-

ing one major theory against another is necessary to bring out

its hidden empirical content. Kuhn found Feyerabend’s cele-

bration of divergent thinking absurdly impractical.

Kuhn’s theme of an ‘essential tension’ between tradition

and innovation affords a second perspective on his account

of convergent and divergent thinking. Inquiry at the frontier of

any creative enterprise involves a tension between convergent

and divergent thinking. Every progressive field places a pre-

mium on creativity, which implies moving beyond the current

frontier; but if a particular move is too divergent, it risks not

212 Paradigm Shifts

being recognized as a serious constructive contribution to that

field. Margaret Boden’s example is that an attempt to introduce

atonal music in the seventeenth century would not have been

recognized as music at all. Kuhn himself denied that the arts

and humanities are as constrained as the mature sciences

(a view since confirmed by extensive historico-psychological

researches by Simonton and others). However, the general

point seems to hold: insofar as a field permits less constrained

contributions, it risks losing the coherence needed to recognize

it as a rigorous scientific discipline at all. Esoteric research

becomes pointless without a common basis of shared meaning

and without a significant potential audience. That is why

a crisis period is so traumatic for mature scientists. A full-

scale revolution amounts to a culture change with the accom-

panying culture shock for traditional practitioners. Yet the

revolutionaries typically insist that they are rescuing the disci-

pline from crisis in such a way as to preserve its integrity.

Kuhn’s account of scientific creativity differs from standard

accounts of creativity in two additional ways. First, although

highly routinized, Kuhnian normal science is not a rule-based

enterprise that follows a ‘scientific method.’ It is misleading to

regard Kuhnian paradigm shifts literally as changes in the rules

of the game, although Kuhn himself sometimes employed

such metaphors. Second, Kuhn denied that normal science is

logical as opposed to rhetorical. He therefore rejected the

traditional view, running from Plato down through Descartes

and the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth to the

twentieth-century logical empiricists, that serious inquiry

must shun the corrupting influence of rhetoric and stick to

logic. Kuhn was among those who insist that rhetorical tropes

such as analogy, metaphor, and simile are crucial to creative

conceptual and practical growth. He contended that normal

research amounts to solving new puzzles by direct modeling

on exemplars; and scientific education involves learning to use

the exemplars as reference points in a network of ‘learned

similarity relations.’ A paradigm carries the promise that its

set of exemplars is sufficient to guide the process of solving

any puzzle that can arise legitimately within that paradigm.

Normal scientists typically solve puzzles by rhetorically

morphing the new puzzle and the old solution(s) until a

sufficient match is obtained. One striking puzzle-solving gene-

alogy that Kuhn provided begins with Galileo’s realizing that a

ball rolling down and then up a frictionless inclined plane is

analogous to the motion of a point pendulum. Huygens sub-

sequently transformed Galileo’s solution of the problem of an

idealized point pendulum into a solution of the physical pen-

dulum problem. Decades later Daniel Bernoulli finally solved

the apparently very different puzzle of the mechanics of fluid

flow from the orifice of a tank. He did this by making his

hydrodynamic phenomenon resemble Huygens’ physical pen-

dulum. The mechanistic paradigm under which he worked

enabled him to see the two phenomena, and hence their

mathematical explanation, as analogous. In this manner, a

successful normal scientific paradigm integrates a variety of

phenomena that don’t appear at all similar to the layperson.

And the integration is rhetorical rather than purely deductive

or inductive, by contrast with the logical empiricist and Pop-

perian conceptions of theoretical structures as deductive logical

systems. In this respect, for Kuhn the overall structure of sci-

ence is as rhetorical as it is logical. And the same is true for

his account of human cognition itself, a theme that Howard

Margolis has developed. More recently, theorists such as

Ronald Giere, Paul Teller, Nancy Nersessian, Paul Thagard,

Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, building on

the work of psychologists such as Eleanor Rosch and Lawrence

Barsalou, have developed even more thoroughgoing accounts

of the role of models in scientific work.

To sum up, a Kuhnian paradigm change (revolution) has

five distinctive features. First, revolution implies successful

revolt – overturning the old regime. Hence, a rapid advance,

in itself, is not revolutionary. Relatedly, a paradigm shift does

not typically result from a massive infusion of new empirical

results. Rather, it amounts to a conceptual reorganization of

the oldmaterials. (Kuhn pointed out how thought experiments

can function to alter basic structural intuitions.) Third, revolu-

tionary overturnings do not occur in a vacuum, with the old

regime simply giving way to anarchy. Rather, practitioners

must be drawn to a new paradigm that they find more

promising. The new one displaces the old, shoving it into the

dustbin of history. As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously

noted, as did Darwin before him, creative enterprises are also

necessarily destructive. Fourth, in any progressive, creative,

mature scientific discipline, revolutions are necessary, occa-

sionally, to break free of the prison of the old framework.

Fifth, paradigm change is wrenching cultural change that

temporarily destroys community solidarity.

Some Questions and Criticisms of Kuhn’s Account

Kuhn’s model of scientific development has attracted a great

deal of attention, both favorable and critical. It kicked off the

‘battle of the big systems’ that characterized attempts in the

1960s and 1970s to provide comprehensive models of scien-

tific development. Few analysts now pursue this project, given

the emphasis in social studies of science on the diversity of the

various sciences and their shaping by socio-political and tech-

nological context – developments that Kuhn’s work also sti-

mulated. Kuhn was accused of relativism and irrationalism and

vilified as a debunker of our more progressive institution.

Donald Davidson argued that the idea of alternative concep-

tual schemes is incoherent.

Stephen Toulmin contended that Kuhn remained too close

to the logical empiricists in positing an overly rigid and inflexi-

ble account of normal science and, as a consequence, was

forced to introduce overly revolutionary breakouts from the

old framework. Kuhn could claim to find such dramatic rup-

tures only because he attempted to project in the forward

direction of scientific work the intellectual shock he experi-

enced as a novice historian of science when he had to jump

back across the centuries to make sense of the physics of

Aristotle in comparison with that of Galileo and Newton.

Working scientists at the research frontier are opportunistic

pragmatists, the criticism runs, not sensitive historians – nor

rigorous mathematicians either. Rigorous mathematics is for

mathematicians, and history is for historians.

Toulmin, David Hull, and others proposed thoroughgoing

evolutionary models of scientific development. Already in the

late 1950s, psychologist Donald Campbell had proposed a

universal evolution model of creativity, including scientific

Paradigm Shifts 213

advance. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others fol-

lowed with their own versions. According to universal evolu-

tionists, selectionist mechanisms suffice to explain not only all

biological life, wherever in the universe it has arisen, but also

all production of novel design, including that of human arts

and technologies.

On this account, selectionist processes are the secret to

creativity – the key to understanding creativity and innovation

of all kinds, albeit a highly abstract or general key. Darwin

discovered the power of selectionist mechanisms in the

biological and behavioral realms. William James, B. F. Skinner,

computer scientist John Holland, and many others since have

greatly extended the scope of selectionist models to the degree

that they are now routinely used to ‘evolve’ problem solutions

on a computer under such labels as ‘evolutionary computation’

and ‘genetic algorithms.’ These variation-selection methods are

generally not strictly analogous to biological evolution. The

latter is just one (in fact, several) of a large family of selectionist

mechanisms. All selectionist mechanisms, however, involve a

highly iterated process of somewhat constrained but otherwise

undirected variation plus a process of selection of superior

variants plus a mechanism for passing the advantageous fea-

tures, to some degree, to the next generation of variants.

Campbell argues that all innovation, all increases of fit to

relevant environment, must, at least, be the product of BVSR:

partially blind (undirected) variation plus selective retention of

variants that happen to survive in the existing environment

upon pain of commitment to providentialism, inductive

instructionism, or a mysterious, nonnatural clairvoyance.

The BVSR models sound divergent, but the variation can be

so constrained, so local and limited, that it is part of an overall

convergent process in Guilford’s sense. In Kuhnian normal

science, the variants produced amount to blind trial and error

only within whatever search space remains for exploration after

the known constraints have narrowed the search considerably.

If something like Kuhnian normal and revolutionary

science exist, is an evolutionary account of creativity sufficient

to explain both? Here one thinks of Stephen Jay Gould and

Niles Eldredge’s account of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to explain

the long periods of stasis in the biological record, interrupted

by periods of rapid innovation such as the Cambrian explo-

sion. Complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman and Brian

Goodwin also maintain that emergent structures that trans-

form complex systems often have a more creative role in the

biological world than Darwinian evolution does, a central

issue of today’s evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-

Devo). If these authors are correct, there are two major sources

of emergent novelty, not one. Other complexity theorists such

as Per Bak contend that no special explanation is needed for

Kuhnian revolutions and other sorts of cascading failures such

as mass extinctions, on the grounds that these systems are

highly nonlinear. A quite ordinary development can occasion-

ally trigger a major event.

Cognitive Economy: Categories, Sets, Schemas,Frames, etc.

At the most elementary level, it is obvious that we must lump

and split into usable categories the ‘bloomin’ buzzin’

confusion’ of world input (as William James called it).

Given our cognitive limitations, we cannot track each individ-

ual item separately but must organize experience, thought,

and action into general kinds of things and standardized

types of interactions. We must impose pattern on the world,

and we thereby run the risk of stereotyping, or worse. Cognitive

sets govern our interaction with the world and with each

other, and Kuhn’s paradigms are cognitive sets or conceptual

‘boxes’ writ large.

The idea of a conceptual scheme or framework supported

by a complex of cognitive processing rules originated with the

philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who was also, argu-

ably, the first sophisticated cognitive psychologist. Kant held

that all human beings represent their experience of the world

in terms of a dozen underlying ‘categories’ plus two ‘forms of

intuition’ – space and time – so that we perceptually project the

world in terms of physical objects causally interacting with one

another in space and time. This was a major improvement on

the radical empiricist theories of associationist philosopher-

psychologists such as David Hume, for it recognized the need

for cognitive rules or regularized processes of some kind to

account for the integration and coherence of our perception

and thought. For Kant, Newtonian mechanics was the outward

projection of our inward processing rules.

The cost of Kant’s ingenious account of cognition and of

Newtonian science is that it presents us with the problem

of skepticism about our knowledge of the universe. For if

the world input must be transformed in various ways so that

we can make sense of it, what reason do we then have to

believe that ours is the correct representation of the universe

as it really is? Isn’t the world as we experience it just a creative

fabrication of our own minds or perhaps of our cultures

and languages? Kant’s response was to deny that we could

know the “things in themselves.” Our best science will always

be the science of the world as we humans experience it.

While the real world does make a contribution to the content

of our experience, the constitutive form of that experience

is imposed by the human mind. As Kant put it, the mind

does not draw its laws from nature but imposes them on

nature. This is one important version of the position known

as idealism.

For Kant the system of categories was absolute and

unchangeable, innately prewired, so to speak. But once he

formulated the idea of a comprehensive conceptual frame-

work, it was not long before the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel

introduced the idea of alternative conceptual frameworks. In

Hegel’s grand vision, the major epochs of human history are

structured by different conceptual frameworks. However,

the ultimate source of the frameworks themselves is neither

nature nor the human mind but human social life – nurture,

not nature – and historians have confirmed that social forma-

tions have undergone major historical changes. Thus Hegel

postulated a kind of sociological reversal of the received

views of mind and world: rather than society at large reflecting

the structure of the individual human mind, we individuals

acquire our cognitive apparatus from the social milieu into

which we are born.

Informed by the deep, German historiographical work of

his day, Hegel’s radically historicist position implied a

completely new conception of creativity and its generation:

214 Paradigm Shifts

1. The creative projection that we call human experience is not

innate but learned from the cultural system into which we

are born.

2. Human history itself is radically creative in the sense that

major new formations such as the modern nation-state,

capitalist economic systems, and conceptions of human

nature are not eternal entities but instead come into exis-

tence in historical time.

3. The most novel structures are not the product of intelligent

human design, however, for such novel designs are beyond

the horizon of imagination of people living during the time

that those structures emerge. Rather, the latter are the unin-

tended and unconscious consequences of a vastly parallel

process of people going about their daily lives.

4. Therefore, people living in different historical periods liter-

ally “live in different worlds” of human experience.

5. Hence, there exists no permanent system of representation.

Even the self-evident truths of one epoch may not be recog-

nized as such in others.

6. This model, like Darwin’s, implies that intelligence is not at

all necessary for adaptive creativity. Creativity, and espe-

cially creative innovation, has more to do with distributed

processes of complex systems.

No one doubts that imagination outruns our rational justi-

fication capacities, but Hegel broached the idea that noncon-

scious processes outrun in creative originality all forms of

deliberate human design, even those based on the most active

imagination. Later in the nineteenth century, Darwin also

dispensed with intelligent design in explaining the emergence

of novel biological design from the massively parallel process

of natural selection, in which every single organism is a natural

biological experiment.

This background provides a larger context within which to

locate current discussions of creativity, including Kuhnian

paradigm shifts, for Kuhn’s paradigm concept owes much to

Kant’s formal framework of categories. Kuhn’s move away from

logical empiricism parallels Kant’s move away from Hume,

also parallels Hegel’s subsequent move away from Kant – and

raises many of the same difficulties. Kuhn frequently described

his conception of science as “Kantian with moveable cate-

gories,” and his most radical statement of the incommensura-

bility of competing paradigms was that scientists on opposite

sides of a paradigm shift “live in different worlds” – worlds

historically created by research that constitutes the paradigm

and the corresponding education regimen. The implication,

from which Kuhn soon retreated somewhat, is that scientific

revolutionaries and their followers are creators of new worlds.

Kuhnian paradigms are ‘moveable’ and, in this respect Hege-

lian, since science students educated within different para-

digms will acquire different cognitive programming. Beyond

knowing what are the exemplary problems and solutions, this

‘knowledge’ of the world remains largely tacit, however (an

idea that Kuhn apparently borrowed from the physical chemist

Michael Polanyi). The programming is not available as an

explicit scientific method any more than it was for Kant or

Hegel. Present in Kuhn is also the idea that major innovation

is largely the unwitting by-product of communities of scientists

going about their normal scientific work, thinking that they

are providing true descriptions and explanations of the world

while actually producing fuel for the next paradigm debate. For

Kuhn there exists no true final theory of the world, since there

is any number of ways in which we might successfully construe

it. There is no end to future science. Nonetheless, Kuhn denied

that he was a relativist and insisted that there is a clear sense in

which scientific paradigm shifts represent genuine progress.

Work by francophones Ferdinand de Saussure, Gaston

Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel

Foucault, and others anticipated or paralleled Kuhn’s themes.

Writing early in the twentieth century, Saussure treated lan-

guage as a relational system. Particular words are arbitrary.

They derive their meaning from their complex web of relations

to one another. Change the relations and you change the

meaning. The so-called structuralists took up this idea, and

we find something similar in Kuhn. Insofar as the meaning of

scientific terms is constituted by a relational system, a systemic

reorganization alters meaning and thus, after all, injects new

content of one sort into a Kuhnian paradigm.

Bachelard and Canguilhem held that the underlying orga-

nizational structures occasionally rupture to produce new

forms of scientific life, and Foucault introduced large discursive

formations or epistemes that demarcated historical periods in

terms of constellations of thought and practice far more perva-

sive than Kuhn’s. Recently, Ian Hacking has built on Foucault’s

insights by promoting the idea of ‘historical ontology,’ accord-

ing to which the conceptual grids of thought and practice that

we lay down bring into existence a host of entities such as

statistical averages, population cohorts, and diseases that did

not exist before. Scientists themselves create many features of

the reality that they study!

Recent work on the history of logical empiricism has

revealed the surprisingly strong neo-Kantian influence even

in that movement, calling into question the received view

that it was simply old empiricist wine in new logical bottles.

Particularly Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap antici-

pated Kuhn’s conclusion that the science of a given period is

underlain by an a priori structure of a sort. Michael Friedman

terms this a “historically relative but constitutive a priori.” He

strongly defends one use that Kant made of the a priori, arguing

that disciplined inquiry requires a stable framework or consti-

tutive intellectual grid on which to operate. Friedman ends up

accepting the existence of Kuhnian revolutions (although with

greater continuity), especially those involving the profound

mathematical changes in the history of space–time theories.

In artificial intelligence, too, we find attempts to organize

inputs and outputs into larger structures. Schemas, frames, and

scripts are three examples of structures postulated to explain

how we (or computers) recognize and classify items and situa-

tions. There has also been much recent work on case-based and

model-based reasoning, in which human beings or computer

programs attempt to solve new problems by modeling them on

one or more already solved problems stored in a case library,

rather than using rules to derive a solution from scratch each

time. This seems close to what Kuhn had in mind with his idea

of exemplars. American law, business, and medical schools

much use of the case method. Critics hold that human beings

as well as computers must really be using rules at subconscious

levels, for example, rules for finding similar cases. But as the

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, we must avoid the

vicious regress of rules, rules for applying those rules, and so

Paradigm Shifts 215

on. At some point a more direct mechanism must take over.

Psychologist Eleanor Rosch and associates have long contended

that people recognize birds, chairs, andmost everything else not

by applying sets of necessary and sufficient rules or definitions

of ‘bird’ and ‘chair’ but instead by matching the new item to

a stored model or prototype. Rules tend to have an all-or-

nothing character: something is either a bird or it is not, while

human judgment seems to operate with something like a

Kuhnian or Roschian similarity metric that admits of degrees

of resemblance. Thus we judge a robin to be a more typical bird

(and more easily recognized as a bird) than a penguin is, and

legal experts judge a new case as resembling one precedentmore

closely than another. Once again, rhetorical matching and

stretching turn out to be as fundamental to cognition as logic is.

Conclusion

The focus of this article is Thomas Kuhn’s study of scientific

revolutions in the mature sciences, but others have extended

the term ‘paradigm shift’ far beyond Kuhn’s intentions, espe-

cially to political and business contexts. Although problematic,

Kuhn’s work on paradigm change challenges previously domi-

nant conceptions of inquiry and creativity by contending that

scientific research involves major ‘Kantian’ framework presup-

positions that are not directly testable but instead constitute

the very intelligibility of the various fields of specialization.

Both ‘normal science’ and ‘revolutionary science’ are creative,

but in different ways. The article locates Kuhn’s ideas in terms

of intellectual history and briefly indicates connections of Kuhn’s

ideas to Darwinian conceptions of creative inquiry and their

critics, including recent work in cognitive psychology, artificial

intelligence, and complexity theory.

See also: Analogies; Divergent Thinking; Metaphors; ProblemSolving.

Further Reading

Andersen H, Barker P, and Chen X (2006) The Cognitive Structure of ScientificRevolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Campbell D (1960) Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in otherknowledge processes. Psychological Review 67: 380–400.

Friedman M (2001) Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Center for theStudy of Language and Information.

Gould SJ (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.New York: Norton.

Gutting G (2005) Continental Philosophy of Science. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Hacking I (2002) Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Hoyningen-Huene P (1993) Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.Kuhn TS (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, with postscript, 1970.Kuhn TS (1977) The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Nickles T (ed.) (2003) Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Runco M (1991) Divergent Thinking. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Shapiro S (ed.) (2000) Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd edn. New York:

Wiley-Interscience. Articles on case-based reasoning, frames, schema theory,scripts, etc.

Simonton Dean Keith (2004) Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, andZeitgeist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thagard P (1992) Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Toulmin S (1972) Human Understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Relevant Websites

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html – Bird, A. (2004). Thomas Kuhn. StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html – Nickles, T. (2009). Scientific Revolutions.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html – Niiniluoto, I. (2007). Scientific Progress.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html – Oberheim, E. and Hoyningen-Huene, P.(2009). The incommensurability of scientific theories. Stanford Encyclopediaof Philosophy.

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html – A detailed outline of Kuhn’s Structure ofScientific Revolutions and links to other sites.

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html – Preston, J. (2007). Paul Feyerabend. StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy.