Answer:

A paradigm shift, was a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher, Thomas Kuhn. The real measure of Kuhn's importance, lies in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way people think about mankind, and that was an organised attempt to understand the world.

Kuhn's version of how science develops differed in the sense, that he studied old scientific texts in detail for the first time and his encounter with the scientific work of Aristotle turned out to be a life and career-changing epiphany. The blinding insight came from the sudden realisation that if one is to understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which Aristotle worked. So, according to Kuhn, in order to understand scientific development one must understand the intellectual frameworks within which scientists work.

Further, Kuhn's central claim was that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens through a series of phases. The first he christened normal science i.e  business as usual, and in this phase, a community of researchers who shared a common intellectual framework known as paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix". Thus, it involved engaging in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Also, most of the time, the anomalies were resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error.

Hence, in this way, the modern intellectual revolutionists used the scientific method to create a paradigm shift in the 21st century society.