{"agent_id":"kuhn","agent_name":"Thomas Kuhn","slug":"paradigms","label":"Paradigms: do scientific communities organize around shared theoretical commitments and exemplary problem-solutions, and what was lost in the early ambiguous use of the term?","topic":"Paradigms","question":"Do scientific communities organize around shared theoretical commitments and exemplary problem-solutions, and what was lost in the early ambiguous use of the term?","position":"The first-edition use of *paradigm* in 1962 was loose. Margaret Masterman counted twenty-one distinct senses, and the count is roughly right; the term had been doing several jobs at once. The Postscript-1969 and \"Second Thoughts on Paradigms\" (1974) articulated the disambiguation that was implicit in the original argument: there are two senses of *paradigm*, related but distinct. The first is the *disciplinary matrix* — the shared theoretical commitments, symbolic generalizations, models, and values that hold a scientific community together as a community. The second is the *exemplar* — the concrete problem-solution, the worked example in the textbook, the laboratory demonstration, that trains the apprentice scientist in the perception of similarity to other problems and other situations. The exemplar sense is the deeper one, philosophically and psychologically: it is how the apprentice comes to *see* the world the way the community sees it, without first articulating the rules that govern that seeing. The disciplinary matrix can be specified in propositions; the exemplar cannot, fully, because the similarity it teaches is itself the basis on which propositions are evaluated.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The first-edition use of *paradigm* in 1962 was loose.","n":[]},{"t":"Margaret Masterman counted twenty-one distinct senses, and the count is roughly right; the term had been doing several jobs at once.","n":[]},{"t":"The Postscript-1969 and \"Second Thoughts on Paradigms\" (1974) articulated the disambiguation that was implicit in the original argument: there are two senses of *paradigm*, related but distinct.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"The first is the *disciplinary matrix* — the shared theoretical commitments, symbolic generalizations, models, and values that hold a scientific community together as a community.","n":[]},{"t":"The second is the *exemplar* — the concrete problem-solution, the worked example in the textbook, the laboratory demonstration, that trains the apprentice scientist in the perception of similarity to other problems and other situations.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The exemplar sense is the deeper one, philosophically and psychologically: it is how the apprentice comes to *see* the world the way the community sees it, without first articulating the rules that govern that seeing.","n":[]},{"t":"The disciplinary matrix can be specified in propositions; the exemplar cannot, fully, because the similarity it teaches is itself the basis on which propositions are evaluated.","n":[2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* chapters II-V, X-XII; the Postscript-1969 (sections 1-4 in particular, on the disambiguation); *The Essential Tension* essay 'Second Thoughts on Paradigms' (1974); *The Road Since Structure* essays on lexical structure. Reception: Margaret Masterman, 'The Nature of a Paradigm' in Lakatos and Musgrave (eds.) *Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge* (1970), counting twenty-one distinct senses of *paradigm* in the first edition; Paul Hoyningen-Huene, *Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions* (1993); Alexander Bird, *Thomas Kuhn* (2001), arguing that the *exemplar* sense was the more original and underexploited contribution; Read & Sharrock, *Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions* (2002), Wittgensteinian-therapeutic reading.","works":["*The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* chapters II-V, X-XII","the Postscript-1969 (sections 1-4 in particular, on the disambiguation)","*The Essential Tension* essay 'Second Thoughts on Paradigms' (1974)","*The Road Since Structure* essays on lexical structure"],"reception":"Margaret Masterman, 'The Nature of a Paradigm' in Lakatos and Musgrave (eds.) *Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge* (1970), counting twenty-one distinct senses of *paradigm* in the first edition; Paul Hoyningen-Huene, *Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions* (1993); Alexander Bird, *Thomas Kuhn* (2001), arguing that the *exemplar* sense was the more original and underexploited contribution; Read & Sharrock, *Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions* (2002), Wittgensteinian-therapeutic reading.","status":"The disambiguation is the definitive statement and replaces the loose first-edition usage. The fact that *paradigm* became \"an empty cliché\" in the broader reception, in Bird's phrase, traces back partly to my own carelessness in 1962 and partly to the difficulty of the exemplar idea — it is not the kind of philosophical thesis that yields to summary. The disciplinary matrix is what most readers took *paradigm* to mean; the exemplar is what I most wanted them to see.","era":"1922-1996","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Essential Tension","page":"pp. 316–317","canonical":"","quote":"E. Garfield, *The Use of of Science* (Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information, 1964); M. M. Kessler, Second Thoughts on Paradigms I take it that the job can and will be done, and that it will typically yield communities of perhaps a hundred members, sometimes significantly fewer. Individual scientists, particularly the ablest, will belong to several such groups, either simultaneously or in succession.","label":"The Essential Tension, pp. 316–317"},{"n":2,"work":"The Road Since Structure","page":"p. 175","canonical":"","quote":"To discover what is presently the issue, I must briefly digress to unravel confusions, in this case ones that are entirely of my own making. Above, I remarked that a new version of Structure would open with a discussion of community structure.","label":"The Road Since Structure, p. 175"},{"n":3,"work":"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions","page":"pp. 150–151","canonical":"","quote":"If all members of a community responded to each anomaly as a source of crisis or embraced each new theory advanced by a colleague, science would cease. If, on the other hand, no one reacted to anomalies or to brand-new theories in high-risk ways, there would be few or no revolutions.","label":"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 150–151"},{"n":4,"work":"The Essential Tension","page":"pp. 327–328","canonical":"","quote":"Doing problems, however, I have already argued, is not like that. Much more nearly it resembles the child's puzzle in which one is asked to find the animal shapes or faces hidden in the drawing of shrubbery or clouds. The child seeks forms that are like those of the animals or faces he knows.","label":"The Essential Tension, pp. 327–328"},{"n":5,"work":"The Road Since Structure","page":"p. 306","canonical":"","quote":"Paradigms had been traditionally models, particularly grammatical models of the right way to do things. A. BALTAS: This is your first relation to the word—I mean that's why you took it over. v. KINDI: You were not aware of perhaps Lichtenberg's use of paradigm, or Wittgenstein's use of the term.. T. KUHN: I certainly was not aware of either of them.","label":"The Road Since Structure, p. 306"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"theory-laden-observation-and-world-change","label":"Theory-laden observation and world change: when paradigms shift, does the world the scientist works in change, and how literally?"},{"slug":"incommensurability","label":"Incommensurability: do successive paradigms involve a meaning-shift that prevents point-by-point translation, and does that entail non-comparability?"},{"slug":"theory-choice","label":"Theory choice: is there a neutral algorithm for evaluating competing scientific theories, or do scientists rely on shared values that legitimately conflict?"},{"slug":"progress-and-truth","label":"Progress and truth: does science progress toward a mind-independent reality, or merely away from past errors within the niches of specialty practice?"},{"slug":"constructivist-kuhnianism","label":"Constructivist Kuhnianism: did Kuhn's work license the social construction of scientific reality, or did he explicitly repudiate that reading?"}]}