New paradigms are preceded by crisis

One of Kuhn’s most important observations about the nature of paradigm changes is that “crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories.”^[1] Discovery of anomaly results in a sense of insecurity that triggers the search for new rules to solve the problem.

Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.^[2]

The insecurity, unable to be resolved by the received paradigm, becomes a crisis.

In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.^[3]

By focusing attention and research on the narrow scope of the problem, new discoveries may result in reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals.

By concentrating scientific attention upon a narrow area of trouble and by preparing the scientific mind to recognize experimental anomalies for what they are, crisis often proliferates new discoveries.^[4]

#paradigms