"You never heard of the paradigm shift? Example: you see a man with his hand up your granny's a**. What do you think?""Bastard.""Right. Then you learn a deadly bug crawled up there, and the man has in fact put aside his disgust to save Granny. What do you think now?""Hero." You can tell he ain't met my nana."There you go, a paradigm shift. The action doesn't change - the information you use to judge it does. You were ready to crucify the guy because you didn't have the facts. Now you want to shake his hand.""I don't think so.""I meant figuratively, a****le.“

Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre Winner of the Man Booker prize 2003

• The whole picture

What is the difference between knowledge and information?

An understanding of underlying principles, patterns and rules is needed to classify an interconnected set of information into knowledge.

Paradigm means “A set of interrelated ideas for making sense of one or more aspects of reality”

Different areas of knowledge have various different models for understanding and making sense of the world.

• The miasmatic theory of disease held that diseases such as cholera or the Black Death were caused by a miasma (Greek language: "pollution"), a noxious form of "bad air". In general, this concept has been supplanted by the more scientifically founded germ theory of disease.

• A representation of the cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century depicts the spread of the disease in the form of poisonous air.

• Miasma is considered to be a poisonous vapor or mist that is filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) that could cause illnesses and is identifiable by its nasty, foul smell (which, of course, came from the decomposed material).

• A representation of the cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century. Before 1830 cholera was unknown in the western hemisphere. It became one of the most feared epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century.

• Dr. William Farr, then assistant commissioner for the 1851 census and a career employee of the government's General Register Office.  For a while, Farr was convinced that cholera was transmitted by air. He reasoned that soil at low elevations, especially near the banks of the River Thames, contained much organic matter which produces miasmata.  The concentration of such deadly miasmata would be greater at lower elevations than in communities in the surrounding hills.  His calculations in 1852 seemed to support this theory.

Explanation: Observed mortality rates for cholera are very similar to what would be expected based on a predictive formula derived by William Farr (dotted line).  Farr felt that the statistical relationship supported his miasma theory. Later it was shown that the finding was coincidental, with more access to contaminated drinking water at lower elevations

GERM THEORY• The alternative theory, supported by John Snow, held that cholera

was caused by a germ cell, not yet identified.  He reasoned that this germ was transmitted from one person to another by drinking water. Snow's germ theory was deemed "peculiar" by John Simon, head medical officer of London, but has since met the test of time.  What was this peculiar theory? 

• Here is a summary written by Dr. Simon:• "This doctrine is, that cholera propagates itself by a ‘morbid matter'

which, passing from one patient in his evacuations, is accidentally swallowed by other persons as a pollution of food or water; that an increase of the swallowed germ of the disease takes place in the interior of the stomach and bowels, giving rise to the essential actions of cholera, as at first a local derangement; and that ‘the morbid matter of cholera having the property of reproducing its own kind must necessarily have some sort of structure, most likely that of a cell." 

• While Dr. Simon clearly understood John Snow's theory, he joined others in questioning the relevance of the germ theory to cholera

• The germ theory of disease, also called the pathogenic theory of medicine, is a theory that proposes that microorganisms are the cause of many diseases. Although highly controversial when first proposed, it is now a cornerstone of modern medicine and clinical microbiology, leading to such important innovations as antibiotics and hygienic practices.

• The Ghost Map

Type of Paradigm Areas of knowledge Example

Deductive system Logic and Mathematics Euclidian geometryThe geometry you learn at school is based on the work of Euclid, a famous Mathematician who lived in Alexandria in Egypt around 300 BC. Euclid's text Elements is the earliest known systematic discussion of geometry. It has been one of the most influential books in history, as much for its method as for its mathematical content. The method consists of assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and then proving many other propositions (theorems) from those axioms. Although many of Euclid's results had been stated by earlier Greek mathematicians, Euclid was the first to show how these propositions could be

fit together into a comprehensive deductive and logical system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BlPfszdQmc

Type of Paradigm Areas of knowledge Example

Scientific theory Natural Sciences Newtonian PhysicsThe system of physics developed by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. Newton’s laws enable us to not only to make accurate predictions, but to explain such diverse phenomena as the fall of an apple or the movement of planets around the sun.

Type of Paradigm Areas of knowledge Example

Style or Art Movement The arts CubismIn the early 20th Century Art went through a fundamental change. Artists began to move away from depicting the world from one viewpoint, from using naturalistic colours and from trying to create illusions of an observed reality. Photography could do this well and freed artists up to explore more the world of ideas.

Gustave Courbet,

‘Still Life with Apples and Pomegranate’1871-72

Juan Gris ‘Still Life before an Open Window: Place Ravignan’ 1915

Cultures as paradigms• Maps of meaning

Cultures as paradigms• Maps of meaning

Paradigms as knowledge filtersImpossibility of seeing the world with ‘clean’ eyes.

Paradigms can help us to organise our beliefs into more meaningful patterns, the danger is that they can act as knowledge filters. They can trap us into particular ways of looking at things and can close our minds to other ways of looking at things.

Evolutionary biologist and Creationist will look at the same facts and draw different conclusions.

“To a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail”

When you buy a certain car you begin to notice them everywhere

When you are expecting a baby you

see pushchairs everywhere

• Your existing world view may affect the way you view this video.

• Since the publication of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have debated the meaning and objectivity of science. Often, but not always, a conflict over the "truth" of science has split along the lines of philosophers and natural scientists on the one hand and historians and social scientists on the other.

• Historically, heliocentrism is opposed to geocentrism and currently to modern geocentrism, which places the earth at the center. (The distinction between the Solar System and the Universe was not clear until modern times, but extremely important relative to the controversy over cosmology and religion.) Although many early cosmologies such as Aristotle speculated about the motion of the Earth around a stationary Sun, it was not until the 16th century that Copernicus presented a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system, which was later elaborated by Kepler and defended by Galileo, becoming the center of a major religious dispute.

Religious attitudes to heliocentrism

• Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and I Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the LORD] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."

• Galileo defended heliocentrism, and claimed it was not contrary to those Scripture passages. He took Augustine's position on Scripture: not to take every passage literally, particularly when the scripture in question is a book of poetry and songs, not a book of instructions or history. The writers of the Scripture wrote from the perspective of the terrestrial world, and from that vantage point the sun does rise and set. In fact, it is the earth's rotation which gives the impression of the sun in motion across the sky

• There was an early suggestion among Dominicans that the teaching should be banned, but nothing came of it at the time. Some Protestants, however, voiced strong opinions during the 16th century. Martin Luther once said:

• "There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."

The realization that the heliocentric view was also not true in a strict sense was achieved in steps. That the Sun was not the center of the universe, but one of innumerable stars, was strongly advocated by the mystic Giordano Bruno; Galileo made the same point, but said very little on the matter, perhaps not wishing to incur the church's wrath. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the status of the Sun as merely one star among many became increasingly obvious. By the 20th century, even before the discovery that there are many galaxies, it was no longer an issue.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw

• Dawkins on “The middle World”

How sensory perception and biological evolution can produce a ‘common sense’ approach to our paradigms that have been regularly challenged by scientific revolutions.

Dawkins also talks of the paradigm shift to heliocentrism.

• http://college-ethics.blogspot.com/2008/04/deontological-approach-to-ethics.html