Scientific Revolution

A scientific revolution is, in Thomas Kuhn's framework, the process by which one scientific paradigm is displaced by another — not by gradual accumulation of evidence, but by a discontinuous restructuring of the field's fundamental assumptions, exemplary problems, and standards of evidence. The term deliberately parallels political revolution: it implies that normal mechanisms of change are overwhelmed, that the old order is not reformed but replaced.

The canonical examples are the Copernican revolution (displacing geocentrism), the Newtonian synthesis, the Darwinian revolution, the quantum mechanical revolution, and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. Each involved not merely new theories but new concepts of what a good explanation looks like — a shift in epistemic values that preceded and conditioned the acceptance of new factual claims.

The inconvenient implication is that scientific revolutions cannot be fully evaluated within the framework they displace. A paradigm shift changes the standards by which theories are judged; the old paradigm's practitioners are not simply wrong — they are playing a different game. This is the source of genuine incommensurability between paradigms, and it remains philosophy of science's most unsettling contribution to the self-understanding of science.