Saturday Night Live and Paradigm Shifts

In this comedy clip from Saturday Night Live “magicians” perform mind bending tricks. Suddenly the explanation to the tricks is revealed and the viewer experiences something like a paradigm shift.

Find the video here:

Teaching Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has its own unique challenges. I find that students can often be locked in to the position that scientific study has been and will always be a constant progression. As part of this, students can sometimes be convinced that science is all about tweaking and slightly modifying core theories and that the world looked the same in the 17^th century as it does today.

I wanted to design a class activity that not only discussed historical examples of what Kuhn calls “paradigm shifts,” but I also wanted them to experience it for themselves. I stumbled upon this video of Penn and Teller doing a series of magic tricks and thought this would be the perfect vehicle to show students how you can move from normal science, to crisis, and then experience a complete paradigm shift.

In class, I would break students up into small groups and have them assign a secretary. I would then play the video and stop after each trick. I would then instruct the class to develop hypotheses as to how the trick is done and list what types of evidence are relevant (sometimes playing the same trick several times when asked to do so). As the tricks progress, many groups will get locked in to standard explanations of magic tricks (i.e. magnets, strings, sleight of hand, etc.), but eventually these types of explanations start to break down — especially when they do the “floating lightbulb” trick.

At the end of the video the camera pans out to reveal that Penn and Teller were upside down the entire time, so all the tricks were done simply with gravity. The groups can then see how the hypotheses they formed early on were completely off base, even though they made sense at the time. They groups can also see that the types of evidence they thought were important at the beginning were completely irrelevant, and that other bits of completely overlooked evidence (i.e. how much product they had in their hair) were important to justifying the true explanation of the tricks.

Possible Readings:

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This section of the Blog of APA is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.

Aaron Spink

Aaron Spinkis currently a Teaching Fellow Durham University at senior lecturer at the Ohio State University and worksprimarily on early modern philosophy.