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?

Thomas Kuhn, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹

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.²³⁴⁵

Sources

1. 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.

   The Essential Tension, pp. 316–317

2. 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.

   The Road Since Structure, p. 175

3. 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.

   The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 150–151

4. 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.

   The Essential Tension, pp. 327–328

5. 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.

   The Road Since Structure, p. 306

Where the argument is made

• 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

How the argument was received

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.