{"id":18057,"date":"2014-02-14T16:45:01","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T16:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/shrinkrants-by-john-naughton-the-observer\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T19:48:07","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T02:48:07","slug":"shrinkrants-by-john-naughton-the-observer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/shrinkrants-by-john-naughton-the-observer\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-18057 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/shrinkrants-by-john-naughton-the-observer\/attachment\/18058\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_m92rfcxdcq1r42dfro1_640-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/shrinkrants.tumblr.com\/post\/76628051240\/by-john-naughton-the-observer-sunday-august-19\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">shrinkrants<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>By John Naughton, The Observer<br \/>Sunday, August 19, 2012<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rawstory.com\/rs\/2012\/08\/19\/thomas-kuhn-the-man-who-changed-the-way-the-world-looked-at-science\/#.UDEz5Dvr_jc.reddit\">Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase \u2018paradigm shift\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions\"><em>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em><\/a>, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you\u2019ve ever heard or used the term \u201cparadigm shift\u201d, which is probably the most used \u2013 and abused \u2013 term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/s\/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=paradigm+shift\">18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon<\/a>. It is also one of the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/thomas-kuhn\/\">most cited academic books of all time<\/a>. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.<\/p>\n<p>The real measure of Kuhn\u2019s importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind\u2019s most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it\u00a0<em>ought<\/em>\u00a0to develop (\u201cthe scientific method\u201d), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as \u201cthe addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors\u201d, as the\u00a0<em>Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy<\/em>\u00a0puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Whig_history\">Whig interpretation<\/a>\u00a0of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards \u201ctruth\u201d, then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.<\/p>\n<p>Kuhn\u2019s version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative \u201cprogress\u201d, he saw discontinuities \u2013 a set of alternating \u201cnormal\u201d and \u201crevolutionary\u201d phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases \u2013 for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics \u2013 correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did \u2013 and should \u2013 work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>shrinkrants: By John Naughton, The ObserverSunday, August 19, 2012 Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase \u2018paradigm shift\u2019. Fifty years ago this month, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4Hf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18059,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions\/18059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}