Further notes about the morphostasis concept – split files

(18) Silent paradigm shifts

Thomas Kuhn observed that the shift of a discipline to a new major paradigm is "silent". What he meant was that extant researchers experience no major shifts, no sudden gestalt events, the scales do not suddenly fall from their eyes in a sudden realisation, Saul does not suddenly become Paul. It is only in retrospect, in reading and comparing text books from different eras, that these major shifts become glaringly apparent to historians. I would like to suggest that the more tautological a shift proves to be, the more that the extant discipline is blind to the shift. By tautological I mean "how could I ever have thought otherwise" – it was already "obvious" in the evidence. This sort of realisation, where nearly all the "nuts and bolts" are already present but less organised before the shift, becomes second nature and simple common sense. Workers in the discipline absorb the actual changes without being aware that a seismic shift is occurring in its perception. This is now looking pretty certain for a "tissue homeostatic" approach to immunology – regardless, again, of any attribution of "ownership". Indeed, this sort of shift can have no "ownership"; for it comes to be what we have all always known but never quite (previously) verbalised.