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
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.