Paradigm Shifts

This is a new inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project about the nature of Change.  Papers are invited from theorists and practitioners on how significant change occurs or has occurred in their discipline, how that change affects or has affected theory and practice, and what part, if any, hope plays or has played in that process of change.

Thinkers and practitioners across a wide range of disciplines have become aware of Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm shifts”, which explains how science operates for long periods without any fundamental change, within a “paradigm”. For Kuhn, change occurs when anomalies increasingly build up, and eventually a new theory is required that can incorporate those anomalies. With the momentum of a revolution, the new paradigm ousts the old, and establishes itself not through objective, rational superiority but through a leap of faith by the scientific community.  Kuhn’s is not, of course, the only way of explaining change. For Popper, change occurs not by establishing “truths” but by dispelling errors.  Others envisage science as conservative, rather than critical, and change as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Most disciplines have historically had to cope with fundamental changes in the ideas or theories central to that discipline. Practitioners have to cope with the consequences of these changes, and amend their practice in the light of ‘new’ or ‘re-configured knowledge. The consequences of such profound changes in thought and practice affect all of us, because our social, political and economic habits are altered as a result.  In an everyday example, parents who have a child twenty years, say, after their first, will find that the instruction they are given by the “experts”, based on “knowledge” differs widely from that given to them twenty years previously.

Change is a dynamic concept and produces dynamic responses. Some resist change, and cling to the old ways. Some embrace it uncritically.  Some attempt, individually or collectively, to evaluate the ‘new’ knowledge – as in, for example, the current state of flux in thought about climate change.

The project will involve people working in the history of ideas, philosophy of science, law, natural and human sciences and all disciplines which have undergone change. We also welcome practitioners who have monitored, reflected on or critically evaluated change and its effects in social, economic and political  contexts.