Paradigm

Synonyms

Exemplars; Incommensurability; Problem solving; Scientific revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn introduced the notion of “paradigm” into the philosophy of science to describe the consensus within a given scientific community based on past achievements that members of the community held as exemplary and thus on how to model future research on these achievements. In his monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 1962 (2nd edition with a postscript from 1970; for detailed accounts of Kuhn’s philosophy, see, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene 1993 or Andersen 2001), Kuhn described the development of science as successive periods of cumulative normal science separated by noncumulative revolutions.

According to this account, normal science is dependent on a paradigm in the form of a set of received beliefs that marks out what the acceptable research problems are and what acceptable solutions to these problems must look like. Yet some of the scientific problems defined by a paradigm may...