Paradigm

A paradigm is a fundamental image of the subject matter within a science. It serves to define what should be studied, what questions should be asked, how they should be asked, and what rules should be followed in interpreting the answers obtained. The paradigm is the broadest unit of consensus within a science and serves to differentiate one scientific community (or subcommunity) from another. It subsumes, defines, and interrelates the exemplars, theories, and methods and instruments that exist within it.

The most famous use of the paradigm concept is that of Thomas Kuhn. As influential as the concept, and the theory of scientific revolutions in which it is embedded, were, there is great ambiguity in the way Kuhn used the concept. One critic found 21 different definitions in his original work. This very ambiguity may have helped to make the concept influential since it could be interpreted and used in many different ways.

The definition offered above is consistent with at least one of Kuhn's definitions, his sense of a paradigm as what he called a “disciplinary matrix.” Some take issue with this definition, claiming that the idea of a disciplinary matrix was an early conceptualization and that later Kuhn defined paradigms as exemplars, that is, as concrete solutions to scientific problems and puzzles. They have in mind definitive laboratory experiments that serve as models for scientists who work in a given tradition.

The later Kuhn did seem to want to restrict the paradigm concept to concrete solutions to puzzles, but this idea works best when applied to the hard sciences where breakthroughs in the lab do serve as models for others. However, few social sciences have much in the way of laboratory research. Exemplars, at least used in this way, will not help us get a better sense of the structure of the social sciences and the ways in which they change. Indeed, the theory of scientific revolutions, of which the paradigm is a central component, has little applicability to the social science where few, if any, “revolutions,” at least in the Kuhnian sense, occur. Social sciences may change dramatically and suddenly but it is rarely the result of dramatic new laboratory developments.

For Kuhn, the dominance of a paradigm allows for “normal science” as the paradigm is fleshed out (but not questioned in any fundamental way). Change occurs as normal science leads to findings that cannot be explained by the dominant paradigm. As these anomalies mount, a crisis phase is reached and the science moves toward a situation where a new paradigm can arise that will better explain both what the old paradigm did as well as most, if not all, of the anomalies. Once the new paradigm is in a position of preeminence, the stage is set for the process to recur.

If, as is the case with the social sciences, there is no dominant paradigm, but multiple paradigms, then the process described by Kuhn is called into question. Anomalies require the existence of an agreed-upon paradigm, and without one it is hard to see how anomalous findings will come about, let alone create a crisis. Rather, the crisis for the social sciences is the coexistence of multiple paradigms in basic disagreement.

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