A DEFINITION:
Here's an interesting idea:
paradigm shift
: an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way
"This discovery will bring about a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution."
Paradigm Shift | Definition of Paradigm Shift by Merriam-Webster
paradigm shift
a time when the usual and accepted way of doing or thinking about something changes completely
PARADIGM SHIFT | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary
There's quite a list of these paradigm shifts in the Wikipedia entry:
A paradigm shift, a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.
Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
We need this fundamental shifts in thinking - the question is how:
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”Quote by Buckminster R. Fuller: “In order to change an existing paradigm you do ...”
The Fertile Unknown: Wisdom from a Paradigm-Shifting Creative: Bucky Fuller
.
THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION:
Here's one of interest to language learners:
The movement known as the cognitive revolution moved away from behaviourist approaches to psychological study and the acceptance of cognition as central to studying human behaviour.It challenged the dominance of behaviourism:
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes. It later became known collectively as cognitive science.[1] The relevant areas of interchange were between the fields of psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy.[2] The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies[3] and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science.[4] By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm.[5][6][7]
Cognitive revolution - Wikipedia
And Chomsky was the leading force:
Chomsky has also been active in a number of philosophical fields, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.[231] In these fields he is credited with ushering in the "cognitive revolution",[231] a significant paradigm shift that rejected logical positivism, the prevailing philosophical methodology of the time, and reframed how philosophers think about language and the mind.[173] Chomsky views the cognitive revolution as rooted in 17th-century rationalist ideals.[232] His position—the idea that the mind contains inherent structures to understand language, perception, and thought—has more in common with rationalism (Enlightenment and Cartesian) than behaviorism.[233]With a little more here:
Jay Doubleyou: learning theory: the poverty of the stimulus
Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> and learning objectives >>> and the common european framework
Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky
Jay Doubleyou: cognitive science and developmental neuroscience
Jay Doubleyou: chomsky and language acquisition
.
TECNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY:
Back in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller (quoted above) talked about the "accelerating acceleration curve" of the advance of technology:
Accelerating Acceleration: Towards Tomorrow | The Buckminster Fuller Institute
We can certainly feel it:
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is a perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change...
In his book "Mindsteps to the Cosmos" (HarperCollins, August 1983), Gerald S. Hawkins elucidated his notion of 'mindsteps', dramatic and irreversible changes to paradigms or world views. He identified five distinct mindsteps in human history, and the technology that accompanied these "new world views": the invention of imagery, writing, mathematics, printing, the telescope, rocket, radio, TV, computer...
Accelerating change - Wikipedia
.
SLOWING DOWN:
But, actually, technological development and its foundation, paradigm shifts, has slowed down remarkably since the 1960s.
The anthropologist David Graeber points out:
The Internet is surely a remarkable thing. Still, if a fifties sci-fi fan were to appear in the present and ask what the most dramatic technological achievement of the intervening sixty years had been, it’s hard to imagine the reaction would have been anything but bitter disappointment. He would almost certainly have pointed out that all we are really talking about here is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail order catalog. “Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We were expecting computers that could actually think!”
All this is true, despite the fact that overall levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the 1970s. Of course, the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased even more dramatically, to the point where private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government. But the total increase is so large that the overall amount of government research funding, in real dollar terms, is still much higher than it was before. Again, while “basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies” research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate practical application, and which is therefore most likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs—is an ever-smaller proportion of the total, so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding has actually gone up. Yet most honest assessments have agreed that the results have been surprisingly paltry. Certainly we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics—that humanity had grown used to, and even to expect, a hundred years before...
If someone growing up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells tried to imagine what the world would be like in, say, 1960, they imagined a world of flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, new forms of energy, and wireless communication … and that was pretty much exactly what they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids? If from 1750 to 1950 new power sources emerged regularly (steam, electric, petroleum, nuclear …) was it that unreasonable to imagine we’d have seen at least one new one since?
There is reason to believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the real pace of technological innovation was beginning to slow from the heady pace of the first half of the century. There was something of a last spate of inventions in the fifties when microwave ovens (1954), the pill (1957), and lasers (1958) all appeared in rapid succession. But since then, most apparent technological advances have largely taken the form of either clever new ways of combining existing technologies (as in the space race), or new ways to put existing technologies to consumer use (the most famous example here is television, invented in 1926, but only mass-produced in the late forties and early fifties, in a self-conscious effort to create new consumer demand to ensure the American economy didn’t slip back into depression). Yet the space race helped convey the notion that this was an age of remarkable advances, and the predominant popular impression during the sixties was that the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying, uncontrollable ways...
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
In other words, there have been no paradigm shifts for the past fifty years - whether it's the physical manifestations of that:
Or whether it's in actual shifts in theory, for example:
Freud's ideas have persisted not because they have been scientifically confirmed but because a century's worth of research has not produced a paradigm powerful enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence of their paradigm's superiority, but neither can proponents of more modern paradigms, whether behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, or psychopharmacology.The Final Frontier: Are We Reaching the Limits of Science? | Discover Magazine
.
PARADIGM SHIFTS TODAY:
On the other hand, Graeber has said we really do need a paradigm shift, in an interview a couple of years ago:
Sean Illing: Here’s why I struggle: We’ve got this complex economic system which requires an enormously complex bureaucracy to prop it up. Plus, we’ve created a culture that reinforces this in a thousand different ways, and cultures don’t change easily or quickly. So we can’t move from the world we have to the world you want without a total paradigm shift, and I have no idea how to achieve that.
David Graeber:I’m a revolutionary. I think we need a paradigm shift, and I think a lot of people are slowly realizing this. They’re pissed off and frustrated with the status quo, but they don’t see a path to a different world or a different system.
Sean Illing: So you’re a revolutionary? Does that mean you want to burn it all down and start from scratch?
David Graeber: You can never start from scratch, and most successful revolutionaries have deep traditions to draw on. But I do believe we have to start thinking imaginatively about systems that are fundamentally differently organized. Shifts do happen in history. We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit.
Why the world is full of bullshit jobs - Vox
He he is writing last year:
At some point in the next few months, the crisis will be declared over, and we will be able to return to our “nonessential” jobs. For many, this will be like waking from a dream.
The media and political classes will definitely encourage us to think of it this way. This is what happened after the 2008 financial crash. There was a brief moment of questioning. (What is “finance,” anyway? Isn’t it just other people’s debts? What is money? Is it just debt, too? What’s debt? Isn’t it just a promise? If money and debt are just a collection of promises we make to each other, then couldn’t we just as easily make different ones?) The window was almost instantly shut by those insisting we shut up, stop thinking, and get back to work, or at least start looking for it.
Last time, most of us fell for it. This time, it is critical that we do not.
David Graeber – After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep – Void Network
Some are saying it's happening now:
Paradigm shifts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 Paradigm Shift—From Values To Careers To Whole Economies
Finally:
Jay Doubleyou: the great divergence
Jay Doubleyou: changing education paradigms
Jay Doubleyou: cognitive science and developmental neuroscience
.
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment