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Confusing Collapse with Change
What we think is paradigmatic change may be collapse
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ August 11, 2021
We thought we understood paradigmatic change from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions after watching the transformations resulting from e-commerce and social media. But it didn’t work out as we imagined.
The popular assumptions about paradigmatic change were already far removed from the focus of Kuhn’s work on the intellectual shifts required for and by the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Still, they helped explain the profound shock of internet-driven change. It was all just a matter of seeing things differently and discovering a virtual reality that we never knew existed before.
While Kuhn’s focus was a major fundamental change in scientific assumptions being shredded by new ways of imagining our universe as radical shifts rather than incremental adjustments, it illuminated the flexibility of our metastructure understanding. But metastructures are abstractions of abstractions, and that is not something that most people easily grasp.
Kuhn’s work was gradually understood to be, itself, a paradigmatic shift. Paradigms being unquestioned assumptions about the nature of things makes them very slippery as it requires us to think about ourselves while analyzing assumptions at each level. This is similar to maintaining two alternative models and explanations of those models in our minds simultaneously. Optical illusions illustrate the difficulty as you see either one image or the other but not both simultaneously.
Mid 20th century exploration of meta-levels is a product of the great difficulty experienced in explaining quantum mechanics in the first half of the 20th century. The Copenhagen Interpretation required the concept of superpositioning of subatomic particles in simultaneously different forms. This is tied to Schrödinger’s cat to produce an understandable paradigm.
People lost interest in Kuhn’s thesis as it was too complex and bizarre, like quantum mechanics and undead cats. However, the concept of paradigmatic change was not rejected but became normalized and a cliche for the digital revolution. We’ve been there and done that, and there were lots of…
