Paradigm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A paradigm is a template, model, or framework. Paradigms can be used to create new objects, just as templates can be used as patterns when outlining or designing something new. In fact, the word paradigm has its roots in the Greek term for a side-by-side comparison. Within the philosophy of science, a paradigm is a general but distinct worldview or theory. The history of science is characterized by paradigm shifts.

The seminal work on paradigm shifts is that of Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). His 1962 monograph, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, described what is essentially a form of nonlinear progress within the sciences. Put simply, during phases of what Kuhn called “normal science,” individuals working in a scientific field share assumptions, perspectives, and methods, and knowledge accumulates in a linear fashion. There is progress, but all of the knowledge and information is constrained by the same set of premises and assumptions. It is in this sense that it is conceptually linear. Eventually the assumptions are brought into question and the inadequacies and limitations of the theories being used are recognized. At that point one or more assumptions may be questioned, and new empirical results may be difficult or impossible to explain. It is not just one theory or method that is inadequate; instead, the fundamental assumptions of a field are brought into question. A bit later an alternative perspective or paradigm is introduced that is so dramatically different from what came before it that the shift is clearly not just an extension of what came before, but a fundamental and overarching change within the field. Examples of major paradigm shifts underscore the magnitude of these paradigm shifts: Einstein’s theory of relativity is enormously different from the Newtonian physics that preceded it; Copernicus initiated a revolution of a similar magnitude; Darwin changed the way biologists thought about the Homo sapiens, and stimulated modern reconsideration of humanity’s role within nature.

In his review of paradigm shifts in the 1999 Encyclopedia of Creativity, Thomas Nickles suggested that research produced within a paradigm is highly convergent, whereas that produced when a shift between paradigms is occurring is highly divergent. Convergent thinking is not very original nor creative. It involves finding conventional or correct answers and solutions to fairly well-defined questions and problems. Divergent thinking, in contrast, is often original and creative. It involves exploring new options; the thinking moves in different and often original and unconventional directions. Various theories of divergent thinking are also described in the Encyclopedia of Creativity (Runco 1999).

Kuhn (1963) also referred to the convergent and divergent thinking involved in normal science and in paradigm shifts. He felt there was “an essential tension” between them, and one that stimulated creative thinking as well as paradigm shifts. Kuhn wrote: “Something like convergent thinking is just as essential to scientific advance as is divergent. Since those two modes of thought are inevitably in conflict, it will follow that the ability to support tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the prime requisites for the very best sort of scientific research” (1963, p. 342).

Paradigm shifts introduce new rules and new problem-solving techniques. In fact, they often introduce new problems as well as solutions. This may sound odd, but such problem discovery is distinct from problem solving, and is an important part of the creative process. Psychologists studying creativity even include problem-finding skills as part of the creativity complex. There is more to paradigm shifts: They also introduce new taxonomies, new classifications of the phenomena under study, and new ideas. Significantly, much of the new thinking that characterizes new paradigms is preconscious. Indeed, many of the differences between paradigms (e.g., Newton’s and Einstein’s) reflect assumptions, which of course are by definition not consciously processed.

Nickles used two tree metaphors to describe the reclassifications that occur during normal science and those that occur during paradigm shifts. The former can be viewed as branching, where new findings and ideas suggest additional specific branches to the tree of knowledge (or perhaps remove an old branch). The research on creative thinking can itself be used as an example. At one point, creative thinking was equated with problem solving. That was the tree, so to speak, and new theories merely identified new kinds of problem solving. Then behavioral scientists realized that thinking is often the most creative when the individual actually identifies a new problem, rather than merely solves an existing problem. Nickles referred to this kind of breakthrough as “tree switching” because an entirely new tree—not just a new branch—is introduced. In dramatic paradigm shifts such as Einstein’s, the old tree is completely dismissed. Nickles gave Mendeleev’s theory of the periodic table of elements and Darwin’s theory of evolution as examples of tree switching and true paradigm shifts.

Kuhn himself described normal science as progressing by working with exemplars. The basic idea here is that problem solving during a period of normal science depends on identifying similarities among problems and questions; and once the similarity is identified, a solution (which is itself analogous to previous solutions) is suggested. Kuhn even applied this to science education, where instruction and the curriculum rely on exemplars, analogies, and similarities. Paradigm shifts, in contrast, involve what Kuhn called “new disciplinary matrices.” This was Kuhn’s way of describing tree switching and entirely new perspectives within the sciences.

Note that disciplinary matrices are, for Kuhn, within the sciences. Indeed, Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts initially focused on the hard sciences. The example above, concerning problem-solving and -finding extends this to the social and behavioral sciences. But the concept of paradigm shifts is now used much more broadly, even outside the sciences. The idea of paradigm shifts and the suggestion of questioning assumptions and nonlinear progress has proven to be very useful in organizational theory and management, for instance, and a large number of articles and programs outlined in business periodicals tie paradigm shifts to innovation. According to Nickles (1999), political debates and advertisements also regularly refer to paradigm shifts. Whether or not these meet the criteria presented by Kuhn is dubious, but the assumption that dramatic shifts of some sort are useful for creativity and innovation is obviously quite useful.

Criticisms of the theory of paradigm shifts underscore the retrospective and even post hoc method used by Kuhn, as well as the implication that normal science relies so heavily on analogies and “acquired similarity relations” (exemplars). Critics often note that normal science is much more inventive and creative than the original theory of paradigm shifts allowed. Alternative conceptions of scientific progress include the evolutionary perspective whereby changes do occur but they are more linear, perhaps the result of a natural selection process. If this is accurate, progress—even highly creative advance—is more gradual and less sudden than described by paradigm shifts. Of course, the interesting thing here is that the evolutionary perspective is itself an analogy, taken from the biological sciences. Still, it is no doubt useful to recognize that paradigm shifts themselves represent one theoretical framework and one set of assumptions. The theory is enormously useful, but not the final word on progress. If it was the final word, the theory of paradigm shifts would, in a manner of speaking, refute itself.

SEE ALSO Discourse; Epistemology; Foucault, Michel; Kuhn, Thomas; Mannheim, Karl; Philosophy of Science; Revolutions, Scientific; Science

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1963. The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research. In Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development, eds. Calvin W. Taylor and Frank Barron, 341–354. New York: Wiley.

Nickles, Thomas. 1999. Paradigm Shifts. In Encyclopedia of Creativity, eds. Mark A. Runco and Steven Pritzker, 335–346. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Runco, Mark. 1999. Divergent Thinking. In Encyclopedia of Creativity, eds. Mark A. Runco and Steven Pritzker, 577–582. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Mark A. Runco

paradigm, paradigmatic In ordinary speech the word paradigm designates a typical example or model to be replicated or followed. This connotation is carried over into the technical use of the term introduced by the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, and thence into a wide range of sociological contexts. The term paradigm plays a key part in Kuhn's account of the practice which he calls ‘normal’ science. In ‘normal’ (that is non-revolutionary) periods in a science, there is a consensus across the relevant scientific community about the theoretical and methodological rules to be followed, the instruments to be used, the problems to be investigated, and the standards by which research is to be judged. This consensus derives from the adoption by the scientific community of some past scientific achievement as its model or paradigm. Scientific training in the discipline involves familiarization with this paradigm, or its textbook representations. To acquire the status of a paradigm, a scientific achievement must offer sufficiently convincing resolutions of previously recognized problems to attract the adherence of enough specialists to form the core of a new consensus. It must also have enough unresolved problems to provide the puzzles for subsequent research practice within the research tradition it comes to define.

The concept revolutionized thinking about the philosophy of science. Until the mid-twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking world, philosophy of science was conducted largely in abstraction from the history or social realities of scientific practice. Generally, an ideal-typical model of science (sometimes, as in the work of Sir Karl Popper, this was explicitly prescriptive) was subjected to philosophical analysis, and its key features commended as demarcation criteria separating science from pseudo-science, religious faith, speculative metaphysics, or other (usually less worthy) activities. Kuhn's major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970), was one of the first successful attempts to pose philosophical questions about the nature of scientific knowledge by way of a serious conceptualization of the history of the sciences.

Kuhn's account challenges widespread assumptions about scientific progress as the piecemeal accumulation of knowledge, and about scientific rationality as a formal process of matching theory to evidence. His alternative vision is of a discontinuous history, in which periods of consensual normal science were interspersed with crises and intellectual revolutions, some of which called into question the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of science itself. Far from advancing in a cumulative, gradual way, revolutionary changes in science therefore involve abandonment of much previously accepted knowledge, and proceed by abrupt qualitative transitions of perspective. By contrast, normal science displays few of the features—bold conjecture, preparedness to abandon assumptions in the face of the evidence, and so on—widely attributed to scientists in Popperian and empiricist philosophies of science. Routine puzzle-solving in terms provided by a shared conventional paradigm is how Kuhn characterizes the great majority of scientific activity in non-revolutionary times.

The attention Kuhn gives to the role of the scientific community, its shared norms, its role in the resolution of periods of revolutionary crisis, the organization of scientific communication and education, as well as the recognition of extra-scientific pressures in the instigation of scientific revolutions, all ensured that his work would be influential amongst social scientists, well beyond the circles of philosophers and historians of science. In sociology, his work was of great importance in enabling sociology of knowledge to extend its scope to include the natural sciences. It was also important in discussions about the history and nature of sociology itself, and of the significance of a persisting lack of consensus around a single paradigm in sociology, and indeed the other social sciences. Was the persistence of rivalry between alternative perspectives evidence that sociology was still in its ‘pre-paradigmatic’ (that is, pre-scientific) stage; or, rather, did it suggest that the model of ‘scientific consensus’ was permanently unattainable, or inappropriate to sociology? Though Kuhn was himself a determined anti-relativist, many of his arguments pointed in a relativist direction, and his work was widely used by those whose main aim was to debunk the view of science as an especially authoritative form of knowledge. George Ritzer has suggested that sociology is a ‘multiple paradigm’ science (Sociology, 1975
) and argued forcefully for more paradigmatic integration in the discipline (Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm, 1981).

par·a·digm / ˈparəˌdīm/ • n. 1. technical a typical example or pattern of something; a model: there is a new paradigm for public art in this country. ∎  a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject: the discovery of universal gravitation became the paradigm of successful science. 2. a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles: English determiners form a paradigm: we can say “a book” or “his book” but not “a his book.” Often contrasted with syntagm. ∎  (in the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages) a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension.

PARADIGM [From Greek parádeigma, a pattern, an example, a basis for comparison. Stress: ‘PA-ra-dime’]. In GRAMMAR, a set of all the (especially inflected) forms of a word (write, writes, wrote, writing, written), especially when used as a model for all other words of the same type. Paradigms serve as models for word forms in LATIN and GREEK (in which key words represent the patterns of numbered groups of nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) and to a lesser extent for such other languages as French and Spanish (principally for verbs). Their use is limited in English, because it is not a highly inflected language. See CONJUGATION, SUFFIX.

paradigm Term formerly used in Form Criticism for the story of an event or saying of Jesus used in the oral period, before the tradition had been assembled in the gospels (e.g. Mark 12: 13–17), but the word is sometimes used now in biblical studies for the methods and assumptions of particular approaches. Thus the shift from a literal to a critical approach, or from historical to literary criticism, will be described as a ‘paradigm shift’.

paradigm A model or example of the environment and methodology in which systems and software are developed and operated. For one operational paradigm there could be several alternative development paradigms. Examples are functional programming, logic programming, semantic data modeling, algebraic computing, numerical computing, object-oriented design, prototyping, and natural language dialogue.

paradigm pattern; example XV; (gram.) example of the inflexions of a class of words XVI. — late L. paradīgma — Gr. parádeigma example, f. paradeiknúnai show side by side, f. PARA-1 + deiknúnai show.

paradigm Essentially, a large-scale and generalized model that provides a view-point from which the real world may be investigated. It differs from most other models, which are abstractions based on data derived from the real world.

paradigm Essentially, a large-scale and generalized model that provides a viewpoint from which the real world may be investigated. It differs from most other models, which are abstractions based on data derived from the real world.

paradigm Essentially, a large-scale and generalized model that provides a viewpoint from which the real world may be investigated. It differs from most other models, which are abstractions based on data derived from the real world.

Paradigm. The title given by Form Critics to passages in the Gospels which contain narratives woven round a saying of Christ in order to drive its teaching home.

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