Epistemic status - could use more rigor.
Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (SSR) is a foundational work in the sociology and history of science.
SSR makes several important claims:
1. Scientific disciplines (e.g. astrophysics) undergo a cycle of paradigmatic 'normal science' and non-paradigmatic 'revolutionary science'.
2. During 'normal' periods, scientists in that field operate from a common scientific paradigm (e.g. Ptolemaic geocentric universe) - a common body of models, analysis techniques, and evidence-gathering tools.
3. As anomalies - discrepancies between observations and the paradigm - accrue, the paradigm enters a crisis. Visionary scientists start developing new paradigms (e.g. Copernican heliocentric universe), initiating the revolutionary period. Eventually one of these wins out, ushering in a new normal period.
4. (most controversially) These paradigms are incommensurable; there is no single metric by which the two paradigms can be judged as to which is a better map of reality. (He actually denotes multiple other types of incommensurability as well, but I find these far less convincing to anyone who has read the sequences).
5. In a later work Kuhn provided a set of five criteria that should be considered in judging the quality of a paradigm.
Like all models, Kuhn's is wrong. But is it useful? Many social scientists seem to think so: according to google scholar, SSR has been cited over 136 thousand times.
In this article/sequence, I will argue that despite issues with all these claims, paradigms are a useful construct. I will attempt to formalize the concept of a paradigm, within the context of Solomonoff induction, and demonstrate how these formalized paradigms can be used to aid in induction.
I will then demonstrate that this new formalism provides us with a metric that makes all paradigms commensurable, and that this metric (mostly) aligns with Kuhn's five criteria.
Stephen Toulmin had an eminently reason