paradigm shift
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.56 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
2
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one, necessitated when new scientific discoveries produce anomalies in the current paradigm.
noun
Any radical change, especially in politics or technology.
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonyms: reconceptualization, rethinking; reframing, remodeling"
- "Fuzzy Set Theory was formalised by Professor Lofti Zadeh at the University of California in 1965. What Zadeh proposed is very much a paradigm shift that first gained acceptance in the Far East and its successful application has ensured its adoption around the world."
- "Recently, there has been a radical paradigm shift taking hold in forums that attend to the education of DHH students."
- "The foundations for a paradigm shift may be in place, but it may be some time before we see whether a truly novel perspective develops or these tensions are accommodated within an expanded modern synthesis."
- "The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. […] In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on."
- "Near-synonyms: sea change, step change, quantum leap"
Etymology
Coined by American historian, physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).