I have heard one definition of “a sudden change that makes something once niche and seldom-seen become ubiquitous”, such as the sudden reduction in price of consumer computing in the 1990s
I have heard one definition of “a sudden change that makes something once niche and seldom-seen become ubiquitous”, such as the sudden reduction in price of consumer computing in the 1990s
It’s both! Marketing blabber and general public usage have obliterated any meaning, let alone its original one.
But in the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn was onto something…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
He noted that scientific progress tends to be incremental, building and evolving what came before it. But there comes a time where what we thought we knew becomes incompatible with what we are now learning, forcing a paragigm shift.
E.g. Relativity replacing newtonian physics, or copernican heliocentrism replacing ptolemaic cosmology.
Edit: Very real. Impossible to predict. You only know after you had it.
Yeah—Kuhn describes reading Aristotle’s Physics and being shocked at how nonsensical it was. Then he spent months going through it term by term, until everything finally clicked: Aristotle’s world has a fundamentally different ontology and causal structure that’s perfectly internally consistent, and in that world post-Galilean physics is wrong—as nonsensical as Aristotle’s physics initially seemed to Kuhn. And there’s no way to get from that world to this one without abandoning the former in toto.
In Kuhn’s view, paradigms are like parallel, mutually-incompatible worlds that happen to share the same surface-level phenomena.
This to me made it fully click
It made me happy to see people talking about Kuhn in this thread. The term “paradigm shift” has been appropriated by marketers and grifters, but it still has a useful meaning in its original context.