The Handbook of New Paradigm Research

An Institute dedicated to research on what it calls the “new paradigm” is morally as well as intellectually obliged to say what it means by this term. It is morally obliged to do so, because claiming that its work is of relevance to today’s world, it invites people to take notice of it, and if so motivated, to join it. And it is intellectually obliged because work on the new paradigm calls for collaboration with like-minded people to develop its tenets and applications. This Handbook is the Institute’s response to the challenge of meeting these obligations.

What do we mean by new paradigm? Einstein noted that scientists seek the simplest possible scheme that can tie together the observed facts. By new paradigm we mean the simplest possible scheme that can tie together the facts brought forward by the diverse disciplines concerned with our observation and understanding of the world.

Developing such a paradigm is not only fascinating:  it is essential. The range of observed facts has been growing exponentially in recent years, but schemes that could tie them together have received scant attention. We have paradigms in physics and in biology, in psychology and in the social sciences, but we do not have a paradigm that would tie together the claims and findings of these discipline-bound fragmentary paradigms. Consequently we lack the insight and the overview that only an encompassing paradigm can provide.

The new paradigm must be encompassing, but it need not and must not repose on personal insight alone.  It must be sourced in the facts reported by the discipline-bound paradigms, and thus have a reliable basis in science. Yet it cannot be a mere integration of these facts. A paradigm is a fundamental worldview, and when it is consistent, that view is reflected in all its elements. A new paradigm is a new worldview, and when it is consistent, the new worldview is present in the interpretation of all the observed facts.

Philosophers have noted that observations do not themselves determine the meaning attached to them: every observation is capable of a variety of interpretations. In deciding the interpretation we attach to the facts, science is guided by the ideals of simplicity and comprehensiveness. The new-paradigm scheme must be as simple as possible—but not, as Einstein himself noted, simpler. It must also be as comprehensive as possible, tying together all of the facts that are relevant to its aims and concerns.

Seeking such a scheme is an ambitious, but not a quixotic, endeavor.  The world around us is not a random assembly of unrelated things and events—its coherence, as nearly all great thinkers and scientists in recent times have noted, is among its most astonishing features.  Searching for this coherence and building on it to gain a sound understanding of the world is a basic task of science and science-minded philosophy. It is the task of elaborating an optimally simple comprehensive scheme:  a new paradigm.

The first Part of this Handbook outlines the principal features of the optimally simple comprehensive scheme we suggest is the gist of the new paradigm.  This outline is not a full description of that scheme; it is an outline of its basic premises.  (More comprehensive treatments can be found in the publications of the Institute: the book series New Paradigm Books [Select Books, New York], and the periodical World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research [Routledge, Philadelphia and London].)  The second Part of the Handbook elaborates the relevance of the scheme to the major fields and disciplines of the contemporary world: medicine and healing, education, politics, economics, and business. The application of the new paradigm to these disciplines interrelates their conceptual schemes in a consistent and embracing interpretation of the facts that come to light in their given fields.

This undertaking is ambitious, and inherently feasible, but it is not and cannot be dogmatic. Certainty is reserved for the theorems of logic and mathematics; statements become uncertain to the extent that they refer to the real world.  Such statements, Plato said, are but likely stories. Hence this assessment of the new paradigm does not aspire to certainty, but it does aspire to be a basis for the likeliest story we can now tell.  The task of the Institute of New Paradigm Research is to research, elaborate, and articulate that story. This is basic research in the truest sense of the term, and it is necessarily interdisciplinary: it builds on facts and findings coming from a variety of fields and disciplines. The publication of this Handbook is an invitation to interested readers to collaborate in the elaboration of the new paradigm, and in the exploration of its application to the principal fields of scientific and human interest.