Jean-Marc
Orliaguet has written an essay on language, metaphors and
post-modernism in the digital world.
“In his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), Kuhn
studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar
system during the Renaissance. In his landmark second book, The
Sctructure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific
research and thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual
world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments,
and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing
paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories,
explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of
standards and phonomena. Eventually, however, their efforts may
generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies
that expose a paradigm’s inadequacies or contradict it altogether.
This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only
be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old
paradigm with a new one. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by
Copernican heliocentrism, and the displacement of Newtonian
mechanics by quantum physics and general relativity, are both
examples of major paradigm shift.”
Available as PDF-format
and Postscript.