As Israeli politics has shifted rightward, assumptions that underpinned a half-century of Middle East policy have been invalidated. It is time for a paradigm shift in how we think about the Middle East, not because a better diplomatic model has presented itself (it has not), but because the current paradigm is increasingly at odds with reality.
NEW YORK – It has been nearly 60 years since the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s thesis was simple but heretical: breakthroughs in science occur not through the gradual accumulation of small changes to existing thinking, but rather from the sudden emergence of radical ideas that cause existing models to be replaced with something fundamentally different. As was the case when astronomers determined that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, these “paradigm shifts” usher in an entirely new model that becomes the basis for “normal” scientific study and experimentation until it, too, is replaced.
NEW YORK – It has been nearly 60 years since the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s thesis was simple but heretical: breakthroughs in science occur not through the gradual accumulation of small changes to existing thinking, but rather from the sudden emergence of radical ideas that cause existing models to be replaced with something fundamentally different. As was the case when astronomers determined that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, these “paradigm shifts” usher in an entirely new model that becomes the basis for “normal” scientific study and experimentation until it, too, is replaced.