THE questions we ask say a lot about who we are. Scientists ask, “Why does it
happen?” Engineers ask, “How does it work?” Philosophers ask, “You want fries
with that?”
Except, of course, philosophers who end up in the computer industry. They
have become incapable of uttering any sentence that doesn’t include the word
“paradigm”. This plague of paradigms is particularly obvious in the current
e-mania. E-mail and e-commerce are old hat: we’re already into e-health, e-music
and e-volution. Each new trend is not just billed as a new business tool, it’s a
“paradigm shift”.
But what does the word actually mean? Don’t bother asking the French-fry
merchants—all they’ll say is: “It depends on what you mean by `mean’.” The
Concise Oxford English Dictionary isn’t much help either: “example or pattern”
doesn’t seem to convey the sheer scale of hype involved.
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Any educated scientist, however, will have a better answer. The word entered
the lexicon thanks to a historian, the late Thomas Kuhn. His 1962 book, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, appears in almost every list of the 20th
century’s most influential books. Unlike many others of its kind, a great many
people have actually read it. In it Kuhn famously argues that science progresses
not by systematic accumulation of knowledge (Galileo to Newton to Einstein to
Hawking and so on), but in a series of unconnected fits and starts. He described
these leaps as, yes, you guessed it, “paradigm shifts”. Such revolutions change
our view of the world—and make it impossible to go back. Everything
collected before a paradigm shift is meaningless afterwards.
Kuhn’s best example is the discovery of oxygen. As soon as natural
philosophers realised that a new gas could account for the phenomenon of
burning, centuries of painstaking research on “phlogistons” went straight into
the bin. That seems clear enough, though philosophers still carp: one critic
accused Kuhn of using the word “paradigm” in 22 different ways.
But whatever linguistic crimes Kuhn committed, they are trivial compared with
those of the computer industry. It has adopted the word after a generation of
computer engineers—who took a philosophy course at college in the hope of
meeting girls—became software billionaires. Even billionaires like Bill
“Business@theSpeedofThought” Gates need to hype up share prices, so every new
operating system, program and computer game is a “paradigm shift”. So, like the
“quantum leap”, which actually means an exceedingly small leap, the term has
become so overused as to be meaningless.
The whole point about paradigm shifts is that they are exceedingly rare. In
the 20th century we had quantum mechanics and the discovery of DNA. In
technology, probably the invention of the computer would count, and perhaps the
Internet, though history may judge them as one and the same phenomenon.
Mind you, it could have been worse. If computer makers had picked another
buzzword from philosophy, we might all be going around talking about
“breakthroughs in epistemological contextualism”. Try saying that quickly after
a few drinks.
