The cow-catcher buckled in the side of the automobile and pushed and ground and mangled it a hundred yards up the track before the train stopped. Kuhn's paradigm consisted of a belief system about the way things work. Any given paradigm included a specific set of characteristics, beliefs, and preconceptions that were maintained by a specific scientific community. Since the introduction of paradigms in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the concept of paradigms has expanded its application to virtually all human activities. Social science, business analysis, and numerous other disciplines use paradigm-based analyses to organize their thinking.
Paradigms serve as a blueprint for making predictions.
However, paradigms are not constant. They evolve gradually in some instances and abruptly in others. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believe, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. Your job, as a trial lawyer facing the task of analyzing, preparing, and trying a railroad grade crossing case, involves the need to recognize paradigms, shift paradigms and capitalize upon the paradigms.