Paradigm (from Greek parádeigma, “model,” “example,” from para- and deiknýnai, “to show”) — A model or example that serves as a pattern. In Plato, the term designates the eternal model according to which the divine craftsman shapes the world (Timaeus). In the philosophy of science it was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, “normal science” is research practiced within a paradigm: exemplary scientific achievements that, for a time, supply a community with model problems and solutions. When anomalies that the paradigm cannot resolve accumulate, a crisis sets in and, eventually, a scientific revolution, in which a new paradigm replaces the old one, as in the passage from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics or from Newtonian to relativistic physics. Kuhn maintains that rival paradigms are to some extent incommensurable, since they differ in concepts, standards and relevant problems. Margaret Masterman (“The Nature of a Paradigm,” 1970) pointed out numerous distinct uses of the term in the book; in the 1969 Postscript, Kuhn came to distinguish the “disciplinary matrix” from “exemplars.” The notion was criticized by Karl Popper, who defended constant criticism, and by Imre Lakatos, who proposed the notion of research programmes; Paul Feyerabend radicalized the incommensurability thesis. Outside science, “paradigm” is used loosely, and not always faithfully to Kuhn, to mean a frame of reference. It is related to epistemology and to the debate over relativism.
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