Learn English – How/From where did the term “paradigm shift” originate
etymology
Paradigm Shift + Thinking outside of the box = Death of a Salesman
Best Answer
This term became current with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): if you Google "paradigm shift was first used", all results confirm that it was first used in that work. He described the same concept in his earlier work The Copernican Revolution (1957), but apparently he didn't use the term paradigm shift there. It may have existed before Kuhn, but all sources seem to suggest that it did not.
As Robusto comments, it's probably just an obvious turn of phrase that could easily have been "re-coined" repeatedly.
As Google NGrams shows, the term had no real currency until the 1980's, but that certainly doesn't mean such bands didn't exist (see this site).
Personally I think that it's quite possible many parents of wannabe rockers (esp. perhaps West Coast Americans) may have used it to describe what their kids get up to on the weekend, even back in the 50's. But it didn't really gain traction until the post-punk era, when the type of music associated with it started to become commercially significant.
Large is a word with considerable history and many meanings, including "Having few or no restrictions or limitations; allowing considerable freedom. Also said of persons with respect to their thought or action" (OED, sense I, 11a). At large (with no hyphen) is an idiom stemming from this, meaning at liberty. It is possible to say at more large, meaning 'at greater liberty' or to use the verb enlarge to mean 'set free'; but these two are rare and not to be used without care.
Best Answer
This term became current with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): if you Google
"paradigm shift was first used", all results confirm that it was first used in that work. He described the same concept in his earlier work The Copernican Revolution (1957), but apparently he didn't use the term paradigm shift there. It may have existed before Kuhn, but all sources seem to suggest that it did not.