After the downfall of positivism in the middle of the 20th century, the intellectual emphasis rapidly moved to the opposite extreme of relativism. Whereas under the dominance of positivism, all kinds of alternatives to physical science were rejected as "metaphysical", now the floodgates were opened to a vast diversity of Eastern religions, countercultural views, multicultural views, angelic visions, channelers, astral projection, auras, paganism, witchcraft and primitivist cults. This is indeed a "New Age".
Among scholars, the impetus and legitimizing of relativism was triggered by Thomas Kuhn, in his very influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn argued that the history of science is a history of revolutions between incommensurate views of nature, views that he called paradigms. The shift from one paradigm to another is essentially an irrational process, which calls into question traditional notions of objectivity and progress of scientific research. This view of science is very popular among the social sciences, where the subject matter is too complex to permit clear empirical testing. As a result, the number of proposed "paradigms" for human nature, for example, have proliferated like new fashions.
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