Paradigms change when they can no longer address anomalies

A paradigm refers to the framework of theories, methods, standards, and assumptions that represent and define a domain or industry. Paradigms tend to resist change, and so anomalies—problems the current paradigm cannot solve—are often ignored, and sometimes overlooked entirely. When sufficient anomalies accumulate, pioneering thinkers begin the process of constructing a new paradigm that addresses the anomalies. This involves nothing less than architecting an entirely new worldview.

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected. Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed—until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way—the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.^[1]

Paradigms, therefore, necessarily account for all phenomena except anomalies that refuse to be assimilated.

Only when these attempts at articulation fail do scientists encounter the third type of phenomena, the recognized anomalies whose characteristic feature is their stubborn refusal to be assimilated to existing paradigms. This type alone gives rise to new theories. Paradigms provide all phenomena except anomalies with a theory-determined place in the scientist’s field of vision.^[2]

#paradigms #metacognition #nonlinearity