Disclaimer. My knowledge of philosophy and the sciences outside of psychology is a matter of intrinsic interest and is elementary at best. My understandings are still in process, and I’m using them to provide structure for this post. Thus, this is a super-simplistic synopsis of a topic I find interesting and my personal experiences through the lens of that topic. Any feedback regarding misrepresentations of the science in question is welcome.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of paradigm shifts, the name of this blog comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. A friend in college first introduced me to the philosopher when she gave me Kuhn’s book for Christmas. While she was correct that I would enjoy the reading, I didn’t get around to finishing the work until about a decade later. When I completed SSR, I was approximately half way through my graduate program and so used to reading research papers that, at the time, a book about the process of science and theory change seemed riveting in comparison.
Paradigm shifts refer to science's change in attachment to the theories that describe, explain, and predict occurences in our world. The shifts happen when enough contradictory or unexplainable evidence accumulates to challenge traditional theories, in Kuhn's words, normal science. The new findings lead to revolutionary science, described as research attempting to yield new evidence to inform and contribute to the development of new theory that accounts for new and old findings. (There is also a phase termed ‘prescience,’ which describes the state of a field that has no unifying theory to provide a framework for the studies contributing information to the field… such as the field of Psychology before Wundt and Titchener developed the theory of Structuralism.) Ultimately, Kuhn proposed that science, our theories and understandings of the world, is a continuous process. Sometimes the process is characterized by violent upheavals as we attempt to reconcile new information to frameworks that do not always account for them, often ending in new theories that best account for new and old information.
Kuhn, who appropriated the term ‘paradigm shift,’ appeared to primarily use the phrase on a macro level. He used the shift from Newtonian physics to quantum physics as an example of paradigm shifts. Within this context, physicians kept generating outcomes that could not be predicted or explained by Newtonian physics. When enough such results were accumulated, researchers were encouraged/forced to seek theories that could take the new findings into account. Once scientists developed the theory of quantum physics, quantum physics took on the mantle of normal science, and findings inconsistent with this theoretical paradigm will eventually lead researchers to develop new theories (actually, I think they already have. That stuff is just waaaaay above my head. As is quantum physics...).
The same process occurs in psychology, of course. As psychologists generated more and more information about how humans function, the first theories of structuralism (how the structures of the brain and body contribute to the human experience) and functionalism (determining the functions of different parts of our bodies and how they contributed to thoughts, behavior, and emotion) were replaced with Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis, which was then mostly dismissed for behavioral and cognitive-behavioral theories, and so on and so on.
The beauty of paradigm shifts, as is displayed across the different sciences, is that the theory highlights the method of gaining and interpreting information, which yields broader theories that inform our understandings of the world from a top-down process. The theory can also be applied on a more personal level.
For my graduate studies, I focused on the field of trauma, both the prevention of violence against women by working with men in both therapeutic and prevention capacities, and primarily with sexual assault survivors in therapy. Regarding the latter population, victims and/or survivors (I use whatever term they prefer) go through violent and unexpected paradigm shifts after experiencing trauma. Most people operate under the Just World Hypothesis… the belief that bad things happen to bad people and that if one is good, he or she will experience positive outcomes.
Clearly after experiencing a trauma, the belief that the world is a positive, safe, just place is challenged, if not blown to shit. There is no uniform reaction to trauma, but potential negative reactions include clinging to the Just World Hypothesis and blaming one’s self for what happened to her or him (“I should have left the party with my friends”) or believing that the world is a negative, dangerous, unsafe place. Both understandable reactions can impair people’s ability to interact effectively in the world.
Assault is… well, I was going to write awful. But really, there isn’t a good way to articulate how awful assault is. No one should have to experience it. The toll it takes on individuals, families, friend systems, and communities is challenging and often divisive. But recovering from assault is possible and involves revising the post-trauma paradigm to include the assault in a framework that also includes a realistic view of the positive things people can experience in life. Much like accumulating new research that does not fit an old paradigm and leads to the development of a new one, survivors collect evidence, day by day, that the post-trauma paradigm does not best help people explain and predict their interactions in the world. It’s a beautiful process, and one I have been honored to be a part of in others’ lives.
Paradigm shifts occur without traumas, of course. One of my biggest paradigm shifts came when I started to see the world through a feminist lens after a primarily Christian upbringing. The two paradigms are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but one certainly trumps the other in my current experience.
More importantly for me, when preparing for this post and reading up on Kuhn, I realized I have made a somewhat problematic error not only in my interpretation of Kuhn, but in how I’ve applied the different paradigm shifts I’ve experienced in my life. I originally thought that paradigm shifts meant replacing one theory with another, but that does not appear to be the case. Often it means accommodating or developing a new paradigm to better fit all information that, to date, no theory could not be incorporated under one umbrella.
A seemingly late but ultimately fortunate realization, at least for me. For most of my life I have lived with a forced dichotomy of choosing one over the other… outdoor vs. more intellectual pursuits, small town vs. city, intellectual vs. emotional. Even as I type the dichotomies out, it seems silly. That said I feel relieved with my overt recognition and acceptance of the “and/both” style instead of “either/or” existence I had forced upon myself.
I have another… shift, if you will, ahead of me… that of student to professional. I welcome the new experiences and responsibilities I will encounter in this untraveled environment. I am also curious to see how the parts of me that have already been developed, that make up my identity through my experiences and (sometimes over-) processing of those experiences, remain intact. I also welcome the new experiences that will lead to the upcoming, inevitable shift.
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