CONCEPT
Paradigm Shift (Kuhnian-Mertonian Reading)
The revolutionary replacement of one complete framework of professional practice with another—Kuhn's concept, building on Merton's sociology of science, now describing the AI transition from implementation-skill to judgment-skill as the basis of professional competence.
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) identified paradigm shifts as the central dynamic of scientific change, and Kuhn explicitly credited Merton's sociology of science as foundational to his framework. A paradigm is not merely a theory but a complete professional framework: shared assumptions about legitimate problems, appropriate methods, standards of evidence, required training, and the meaning of competent performance. Normal science operates within the paradigm; revolutionary science replaces it. The transition is not gradual accumulation but crisis-driven rupture. And—most importantly for the AI moment—the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old: the criteria for competence in the new framework cannot be translated into the old framework's terms. Practitioners trained in the old paradigm cannot evaluate the new one on their own terms, because their terms are the old paradigm's terms. The AI transition from implementation-skill (the old paradigm) to judgment-skill (the new paradigm) exhibits this incommensurability with painful clarity.
