Kuhn Cycle

The Kuhn Cycle is a simple five step cycle first proposed by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That book explains how models evolve. His work focused on scientific models. However, the Kuhn Cycle can be applied not just to science, but to any body of knowledge whose use is critical and whose construction is evolutionary. Thus it applies to the model that civilization uses to run itself.

The five steps of the Kuhn Cycle are:

1. Normal Science

2. Model Drift

3. Model Crisis (This is the step civilization is in now.)

4. Model Revolution (The length and destructiveness of this step must be minimized.)

5. Paradigm Change

For a quick overview please see Introduction to The Kuhn Cycle.

How difficult it is to make it through a cycle may be seen in this extract from Kuhn's book, who is quoting Max Planck:

"...a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This passage from the Wikipedia section on Transition Period of scientific revolutions explains why paradigms are so hard to change, whether they be in science or activism:

"According to Kuhn, the scientific paradigms preceding and succeeding a paradigm shift are so different that their theories are not comparable (incommensurable). The paradigm shift does not merely involve the revision or transformation of an individual theory, it changes the way terminology is defined, how the scientists in that field view their subject, and, perhaps most significantly, what questions are regarded as valid, and what rules are used to determine the truth of a particular theory. Kuhn observes that they are incommensurable — literally, lacking comparability, untranslatable. The new theories were not, as the scientists had previously thought, just extensions of old theories, but were radically new world views. Such incommensurability exists not just before and after a paradigm shift, but in the periods in between conflicting paradigms. It is simply not possible, according to Kuhn, to construct an impartial language that can be used to perform a neutral comparison between conflicting paradigms, because the very terms used are integral to the respective paradigms, and therefore have different connotations in each paradigm. The advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an invidious position: 'Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing science and its problems, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof.' "