Paradigm Shift Essay

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“That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow”.

What is stated above happens around us all the time. Something might be proven today, but proven wrong tomorrow. Therefore I completely agree to this statement. But how do we accept something to be knowledge, and what makes one thing knowledge and the other thing just a theory? We can look at it from various aspects.
We can define knowledge as a justified, true belief that can be shared by means of language.
If something is knowledge today it is known as a paradigm. It is a sort of pattern.
When the paradigm changes it is called a paradigm shift.

So what is a paradigm shift?
According to Thomas Kuhn, who was an American physicist, historian and a philosopher of science and the first person to share this idea with the world trough his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share". So in other words it is a scientific proven fact.

Here is an example of a paradigm shift:
If we look at the way humans were punished for murdering someone 100 years ago and compare it to the punishment they get for committing the same crime nowadays. We see that the punishment in the present is way less violent then 100 years ago.
It is a fact that punishments 100 years ago were harsher then they are now, that makes it a paradigm. Since it is not like that anymore these days, we can speak of a paradigm shift.

There are several Areas of Knowledge you can use to determine if something is accepted as knowledge or not. I am going to look at some paradigm shifts by use of the Area of Natural Sciences.
If a person in a lab is going to look at several blood samples. This person sees that all of the ...

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...aradigm shifts take longer to develop therefore it happens over a longer period of time.
Humans with white skin thought they were superior to the ones with black skin for thousands of years. It was normal in those days for a white person to lower a dark skinned person. Nowadays both live next to each other. Racism and discrimination is even against the law nowadays while slavery was still supported around the year 1850.

It is hard to prove that something is ‘true’ in Economics, since in Economics mostly words are used instead of pure facts. In Natural Sciences it is the contrary. Proving something as ‘true’ and as knowledge is very straight forward in natural sciences. Therefore I believe that the statement “That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow” applies more to the natural sciences then to the Human Sciences such as Economics.

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