A concept put forward by Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) in his book The structure of scientific revolutions (1962) to denote a rapid and discontinuous change from one paradigm to another (i.e., a ‘scientific revolution’) due to a growing dissatisfaction with the guiding principles and theory in a particular scientific community. A frequently cited example is the change in physics from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and perhaps another is the switch in psychology from behaviorism to cognitivism (the so-called cognitive revolution). It is questionable whether such qualitative change is a widespread phenomenon as Kuhn held as scientists have the tendency to tinker around with existing theories until they fit with any new challenging findings. Another aspect of Kuhn’s framework is that competing paradigms in science are often incommensurable with each other, a viewpoint that argues against ultimately finding a theory of everything. An example in psychology is current incompatibility of information-processing theories and those resting on dynamical systems approaches.
See Behaviorism, Dynamical systems approaches, Hixon symposium, Information-processing theories, Newtonian (or classical) mechanics, Paradigm, Principle, Theory of Everything (ToE)