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Most importantly, as a new paradigm emerges, a different view of the nature
of reality emerges. New research questions, methods, and standards emerge; the
results are a reconceptualization of the field. The new paradigm, according to
Kuhn, is “incommensurable” with the old paradigm.
For example, in the world of print from the scientific age to the information age,
our belief system seemed to be intact. Our culture appeared to be integrated, hol-
istic, directed, and consistent. However, when belief systems are challenged, cul-
tures become fragmented or disintegrated, lose direction, and are seemingly at
odds within. Our sense of how the world works and our place in it is challenged.
Knowledge, once privileged and integrated, loses its monopoly, as demonstrated
by Wikipedia, where information is created by a network of anonymous authors,
rather than by individual experts.
The new view of reality started to emerge at the beginning of the 20th century,
in physics. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, Max Planck's quantum theory, and
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle destroyed the Newtonian worldview of a mech-
anistic world. Uncertainty, probability, and relativism destroyed the neat Newtonian
perspective of a harmonious universe.
The destruction of the mechanistic and deterministic world is analyzed in an
excellent report by Peter Schwartz and James Ogilvy,
The Emergent Paradigm:
Changing Patterns of Thought and Belief
(1979). They studied a number of dis-
ciplines and discipline-like fields and their contribution to the “emergent paradigm.”
A review of physics, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, politics, psychology, lin-
guistics, religions, and art, as well as discipline-like areas, such as brain theory,
ecology, evolution, and consciousness, led to our understanding of the emergent
paradigm and proposed a list of characteristics:
1.
From simple toward complex views of phenomena
2.
From hierarchic toward heterarchic views of order
3.
From mechanical toward holographic metaphors
4.
From a view that the unknown can be determined toward an acceptance
of indeterminacy
5.
From linear cause and effect toward mutual causality
6.
From a view of change as a planned assembly of events toward a sense
that change is ongoing and spontaneous
7.
From a belief in objective research toward an acceptance of perspective
research (Achleitner and Hale, 1988)
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