ABSTRACT
Puzzles, paradigms and paradox The next step in resolving intractable problems requires reframing the problem at hand in accordance with our revised set of assumptions (i.e. within a new paradigm). This brings us to the work of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn started his career as a physicist, but shifted his focus to the history and philosophy of science in the 1950s. In 1962 he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In his book, Kuhn traces the history of science and concludes that it progresses through periods of slow stable growth, punctuated by revolutionary paradigm shifts marked by crisis before one prevailing theory is discarded and replaced by another. He rejects the idea that science precedes in a gradual progression that incrementally reveals the true nature of reality. Rather, his historical view suggests that as a new disorganised science becomes more and more organised, it eventually structures into a ‘normal science’ consisting of a single paradigm. According to Kuhn, the stable, ‘normal’ periods of scientific change are qualitatively different from the changes that take place during paradigm shifts (Bird 2011). Chalmers (2002) describes a scientific paradigm as comprising the beliefs, general theoretical assumptions, laws and techniques adopted by its particular scientific community (e.g. the Newtonian paradigm). However, as discussed earlier, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows that there are problems that cannot be solved within the paradigm they are situated. This is particularly so in the case of intractable or ‘wicked’ problems.
