Concepts change within a discipline by variation and selection rather than by wholesale replacement.
Toulmin's 1972 alternative to Kuhn's revolutions. He argued disciplines change as populations of concepts do — gradually, with variation and selection — rather than by wholesale paradigm replacement.
In practice
- A profession that adopted a word for a procedure in 1985 uses the same word in 2020 for something the 1985 practitioners would not recognise.
- A discipline's vocabulary in 1990 and 2020 shares most of its terms with drifted meanings, which is variation and selection rather than replacement.
- Standing
- Advanced as the evolutionary alternative to Kuhn's revolutionary account.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself