Kuhn
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Perspective can refer to more than just an individual point of view. Communities, including the scientific community, can have points of view as well. In his seminal 1962 book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (American scientific philosopher, 1922-96) defined the word "paradigm" to mean the scientific worldview. He realized that scientific thought does not advance through the accumulation of more and more knowledge, but through paradigm shifts, ways of looking at the world in a different manner. The shift from Newtonian to quantum physics is one example— no new facts were gathered, simply a new way of understanding the field. Furthermore, Kuhn argued, one paradigm is not necessarily more correct than another, merely more useful. Many contemporary philosophers take this notion to an extreme, saying, for example, that Western science is no more valid than astrology. The questions become: Is there an absolute truth? Do we construct reality through science, or are different scientific notions simply alternate ways of looking at the world? Kuhn seems to be saying the latter: there is an objective, unchanging world out there; it is just a matter of how we look at it.
