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What I Saw at the Revolution

In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn launched the term paradigm into the pseudo-intellectual vernacular. He used it to describe ...

By Mark O'Brien | Updated on September 30, 2001

In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn launched the term paradigm into the pseudo-intellectual vernacular. He used it to describe sets of circumstances that, for a time, establish modes of inquiry, progress, and (dare we say?) normality. In defining “paradigms,” Kuhn wrote: “These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”

Y2K may not have yielded any one universally recognized (or accepted) scientific achievement, but it did provide a model problem. In the insurance industry, the myriad computer-scientific achievements of Y2K’s post-compliance period defined the sub-industry we now know as insurance technology. Insurance technology engendered the systems, applications, and programs to which we now refer ubiquitously and ever-more meaninglessly as solutions. And those solutions manifest the modes of inquiry and progress by which a community of practitioners now proliferates.

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