Emergent paradigms: an analytic essay

Abstract

Contemporary society lives in an epistemologic transition in which the paradigm of modern science has been surpassed. Various paradigms emerged since the revolution within the natural sciences prompted by physics during the 20th century. Based on the ideas of Capra and Santos, in this essay we analyze the innovations proposed by the scientific paradigms that emerged as a result of the crisis in the new world order. Using a retrospective approach, we trace the historic emergence of these paradigms. This enabled us to see that the manner by which a scientist views a specific world object is oriented by the paradigm in which he works and that this perspective then becomes a criteria for judging truth and reality; therefore impacting all practice areas, including nursing.  We identified that the emergent paradigm includes the concepts of complexity and plural rationality and that the proposed innovations in the scientific paradigms have an antipositivist epistemologic position anchored on the concepts of complexity, holism, interdisciplinarithy, the rescuing of subjectivity, valorization of ethical and ecologic questions.