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Shifting Paradigms
Introduction
Paradigm Shifters: Jaime
Escalante | Roger
Bannister 4-minute mile barrier | Pat
Riley's 1%
Failed Paradigms : Joe
Wong |
Forces
of influence |
Personality
Types | Language
as a function of gender | Website
Ease of Use as a function of gender | Computing
as a function of gender - Why only the developed world lacks women in computing
| Perception
| Contextual
factors
Creativity:
Framework
for Institutionalizing Creativity in the Workplace | Inducing
Creativity | Think
outside the box | Kick-
starting the creative process - Rubber Bands | Categories
of creativity: The Change-Abstract Level Axis| The
Eagle | The
Otter | The
Unicorn | Creativity
tools
Links
Introduction
Forces of influence are factors
that affect the way a problem is identified, perceived, defined, and
evaluated. Forces of influence include contextual factors, urgency,
importance, thinking styles, individual versus group impact, personal
attributes, and collective perceptions and paradigms. Age, gender, education,
ethnicity, financial status, pedigree and self-bounded rationality are all
forces of influence.
A paradigm is a framework, recipe
or pattern. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines this usage as "a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any
kind."
We ague that one of the
forces of influence, self-bounded rationality, is perhaps the greatest barrier to
shifting paradigms, or the reality of paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking
. This is similar to what psychologists term Confirmation bias.
Paradigm shift is a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science.
The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, 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, 1977). 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).
- Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt an array of stances (e.g., Marxist criticism, Deconstruction, 19th-century-style literary criticism), which may be more or less fashionable during any given period but which are all regarded as legitimate.
In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as:
- What is to be observed and scrutinized
- The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject
- How these questions are to be structured
- How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted
One important aspect of Kuhn's paradigms is that the paradigms are incommensurable, meaning two paradigms cannot be reconciled with each other because they cannot be subjected to the same common standard of comparison. That is, no meaningful comparison between them is possible without fundamental modification of the concepts that are an intrinsic part of the paradigms being compared.
This way of looking at the concept of "paradigm" creates a paradox of sorts, since competing paradigms are in fact constantly being measured against each other.
For this reason, paradigm as a concept in the philosophy of science might more meaningfully be defined as a self-reliant explanatory model or conceptual framework. This definition makes it clear that the real barrier to comparison is not necessarily the absence of common units of measurement, but an absence of mutually compatible or mutually intelligible concepts. Under this system, a new paradigm which replaces an old paradigm is not necessarily better, because the criteria of judgment is controlled by the paradigm itself, and by the conceptual framework which defines the paradigm and gives it its explanatory value.
Michel Foucault used the terms episteme and discourse, mathesis and taxinomia, for aspects of a "paradigm" in Kuhn's original sense.
Simple common analogy: A simplified analogy for paradigm is a habit of reasoning, or "the box" in the commonly used phrase "thinking outside the box". Thinking inside the box is analogous with normal science. The box encompasses the thinking of normal science and thus the box is analogous with paradigm. "Thinking outside the box" would be what Kuhn calls revolutionary science. Revolutionary science is usually unsuccessful, and very rarely leads to new paradigms. However, when they are successful they lead to large scale changes in the scientific worldview. When these large scale shifts in the scientific view are implemented and accepted by the majority, it will then become "the box" and
Jaime
Escalante
The spotlight was focused on Jaime Escalante when in 1982 14 of his Garfield High School students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam were accused of cheating. The paradigm at the time was: It is not possible that various students from a struggling campus of working-class, largely Mexican American students can pass a demanding AP calculus exam. Escalante's eventual triumph with the Garfield 14 is told in the James Edward Olmost movie, Stand and
Deliver, leading to educators from around the country traveling to
see Escalante in action at Garfield - which built one of the largest and most successful
AP programs in the nation.
To be sure, Jaime Escalante was a polarizing figure who did not get along with many of his public school colleagues. He pushed for tougher standards and accountability for students,
educators and parents, but he motivated students with his entertaining style and
thorough understanding of math.
When Escalante's is merely characterized as " the East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, " largely misses the point. Escalante was a paradigm changer, not unlike
.
Experts a the time, feared that the human body was not designed to run the mile
at less than 4 minutes, and if people tried, the body would be damaged at that
speed.
Once Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier, Sports Illustrated
named it the twentieth century’s greatest sporting achievement. Psychological
as well as physical, it opened the floodgates for those who followed. As Steve
Chandler wrote in 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back & The Truth That Will
Set You Free, after Bannister turned his dream into reality, runners
"expanded their minds and accomplished even bigger things."
Based on the state of affairs of
public education in California as of 2010 seems like Escalante's paradigm
shift may have perfect elastic memory, however.
PAT
RILEY'S 1%
PAT
RILEY is one of the most successful coaches in NBA history. Perhaps he was lucky
to have such excellent players, but many people have the resources to succeed
and fail to do so. Pat’s ability to succeed is based on his commitment to
constant improvement.
By
the end of the 1986 season, the Los Angeles Lakers had lost to the Boston
Celtics, even though the players had given their best. For 1987, Pat convinced
them that increasing the quality of their game by a mere 1% over their personal
best would make a major difference. This seemed ridiculously small, but when
twelve players increase their performance by 1% in 5 areas of skill, the
combined effort would make a 60% improvement to the team. A 10% difference would
probably have been enough to win the championship.
The
result was that most of the players improved their individual games by at least
5%. Success came because everyone believed it was achievable. A little 1%
improvement was easy.
That sense of certainty in
pursuit of their goals made them tap even greater potential.
Self-bounded
rationality - the 4-Minute Mile
A good number of people avoid doing things because they think the can't.
Take for instance the 4-minute mile. Experts feared that the human body
was not designed to run the mile at less than 4 minutes, and if people tried,
the body would be damaged at that speed.
Guess what would happen when athletes tried?
Once Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier, Sports Illustrated
named it the twentieth century’s greatest sporting achievement. Psychological
as well as physical, it opened the floodgates for those who followed. As Steve
Chandler wrote in 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back & The Truth That Will
Set You Free, after Bannister turned his dream into reality, runners
"expanded their minds and accomplished even bigger things."
Failed Paradigms : Joe
Wong |
So, just because you share a
certain ethnicity with others, your message can be delivered effectively -
right? Not really. When the message is comedy, context is key, as
demonstrated by Chinese-born, bio-chemist turned comedian
Joe Wong can attest to: While Mr. Wong was invited to the Late Night
Show with David Letterman in 2009, the audience cracked up when he walk in
and said "Hi everybody...So, I am Irish." While Mr. Wong's humor
makes an American audience laugh, in China, where he grew up, people do not not
get it.
Links
- Clarke, Thomas and Clegg,
Stewart (eds). Changing Paradigms. London: HarperCollins, 2000.ISBN
0-00-638731-4
- Handa, M. L.(1986) "Peace
Paradigm: Transcending Liberal and Marxian Paradigms" Paper presented
in "International Symposium on Science, Technology and Development, New
Delhi, India, March 20–25, 1987, Mimeographed at O.I.S.E., University of
Toronto, Canada (1986)
- Kuhn, Thomas S. The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd Ed. Chicago and London: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN
0-226-45808-3
- Masterman, Margaret, "The
Nature of a Paradigm," pp. 59–89 in Imre Lakatos and Alan
Musgrave. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1970. ISBN
0-521-09623-5
- Encyclopædia Britannica,
Univ. of Chicago, 2003, ISBN
0-85229-961-3
- Dogan, Mattei.,
"Paradigms in the Social Sciences," in International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 16, 2001)
- Paradigm
Presentation An interesting look at how a Paradigm is created
- "JSTOR:
British Journal of Sociology of Education: Vol. 13, No. 1 (1992), pp.
131-143". http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0142-5692%281992%2913%3A1%3C131%3ATPWRFT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U.
Retrieved 2007-06-18.
- The Fourth Paradigm:
Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, Microsoft Research, 2009, ISBN
978-0-9825442-0-4 http://fourthparadigm.org
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