We do indeed perceive the weight and movement of objects and can measure them as Galileo did, but what we don’t directly experience are the natural laws that science tells us govern those things and our seeing itself.

Galileo redefined the falling stone as a material body having the measurable properties of mass and velocity and for the observed action of which he undertook to find a universal mathematical formula.

For Aristotle the stone has a particular nature that it seeks to fulfill, and its falling is aimed at coming to rest in its natural place which is on the ground. According to his paradigm not only is what we see not the reality, but neither is our seeing itself what it appears to be, that is, a distinctly conscious function, but is rather some dance of material particles in our bodies which too are conglomerates of such material elements.Įnlightenment science monopolistically replaced the previous paradigm of Aristotelian science in which everything is a vital essence that we intuit as such, and the difference is illustrated by Kuhn’s comparison of the philosopher’s and Galileo’s approaches to falling bodies. Newton subsequently created a model of the world composed entirely of elementary material bodies acting in accordance with his laws, again claiming that they are the reality and not the objects of our common experience. Yet of much greater consequence than the change in the map of the heavens was the method employed to produce it that measured phenomena and constructed a model to account for the data. Of course understanding observed motion as relative to the frame of reference is nothing new as we walk we see the scenery pass by. The Copernican Revolution asserted that what we see isn’t the reality, for we see the sun moving across the sky, but the reality is that the sun is fixed, and it’s the earth that is moving. This was the shift from Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the heavens to Copernicus’ heliocentric scheme that overturned the relation between normal human experience and the scientific account of the world. Because the modern way of life is breaking down, and changing everything requires such a shift, we do well to revisit Kuhn’s analysis to aid us in achieving the transformation.Īlthough critics argued that he blurred the lines between a total scientific revolution, a paradigm shift in a single area and mere evolution of scientific understanding and practice, there is one unequivocal instance of a paradigm shift that amounted to a revolution. Increasingly people are calling for a worldview shift to address our crises with climate, capitalism, social life and more. With his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn launched the concept of paradigm shift which could be applied to a variety of historical cultural changes as well as desired future ones.

Paradigm shift team building activity