What is the meaning of "Paradigm Shift"?

Question

What does it mean? Sorry I suck At English and Am not An American

Answer 1

A Paradigm Shift is when a significant change happens - usually from one fundamental view to a different view. In most cases, some type of major discontinuity occurs as well. It was used largely in a scientific context, but over time the phrase has seeped into the cultural at large, so technically it's not accurate outside of the scientific community.

Thomas Kuhn wrote about Paradigm Shift during the early 1960s, and explained how "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" caused "one conceptual world view to be replaced by another view."

In laymen terms, Paradigm Shift is a popular, or perhaps, not so popular shift or transformation of the way we Humans perceive events, people, environment, and life altogether. It can be a national or international shift, and could have dramatic effects -- whether positive or negative -- on the way we live our lives today and in the future.

Answer 2

A paradigm is a structured concept,idea or a practice.Any change in that due to any reasons leads to a  'paradigm shift'.By the way,Americans are generally poor in English.

Answer 3

Paradigm shift, sometimes known as extraordinary science or revolutionary science, is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.

It has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). A scientist, however, once a paradigm shift is complete, is not allowed the luxury, for example, of positing the possibility that miasma causes the flu or that ether carries light in the same way that a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for instance, or select Marxism as an explanation of economic behaviour. Thus, paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them, do not exist in Humanities or social sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been adopted since the 1960s and applied in non-scientific contexts.

Answer 4

A 'paradigm' is how we think of most things.  For instance, drunks are old men swigging from bottles in paper pags in an alley-way.  When, in reality, a drunk can be anyone, from a supreme court judge, do a neuro-surgeon, to a housewife, to your public school teacher.  

A 'paradigm' is the way you have thought about something all your life. Shifting a 'paradigm' happens when you open your mind to the fact that what you've always thought about something may in fact be different.  History and events often influence our paradigms.  There was once a time when only 'cheap mass produced'products came from Asia, when in fact some of the most highly sophisticated tehcnology comes from there.

Does this help?

Answer 5

A Paradigm Shift is when you (or the powers that be in a society or culture) move from using one model of thinking to a completely different way of thinking.

For example Newtonian Physics to Einsteinian Physics or Modernism to Post-Modernism.