Paradigm

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Paradigm
/ˈpærədaɪm/ (n.)

1. (Epistemology; nowadays rare) The idea, first finding voice in Thomas Kuhn’s spectacular The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that any academic discipline comprises not just a body of canonical knowledge, but a language, world-view, hierarchy, intellectual tradition and social organisation which, prevents you from credibly sounding off about it until you have fully assimilated it and, basically, been indoctrinated by it. Not that it has ever stopped the JC trying.

2. (Management consultancy, distressingly common): A fashionable idea someone else had recently that you are now cottoning on to that promises to, but won’t, profoundly change the commercial world.

Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms

In its sensible state, a paradigm describes how a scientific discipline operates, and how scientific theories are challenged and fall. As Thomas Kuhn observed, contrary to what Karl Popper’s falsificationism would suggest, one does not abandon an accepted scientific theory just because you come across some contradictory evidence. As much as anything else, to do that would be profoundly wasteful. All that work down the drain because of some tiny inconsistency with canonical theory like, oh, say all astronomical bodies in the universe are accelerating away from each other in a way that cosmology just can’t explain. Instead, you tap the dial, you re-run the experiment, you devise “numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications” — you know, dark matter, alternative universes, hidden spatiotemporal dimensions, string theory — to eliminate the apparent conflict. Scientists of a given discipline — a “particular community of specialists” — are imaginative in their defence of the status quo.

All this takes place inside what Kuhn describes as a “paradigm” — a “particular coherent tradition of scientific research” governing not only the theory but the education, instrumentation, rules and standards of practice. The community comes together around a corpus of basic propositions which it can then apply in developing further propositions, burying the basic ones ever further in the foundations. The more of these applications there are, and the more useful, and pervasive, the paradigm becomes, but the more incentive to its members have to defend it. The scientific community decides not just what laws and rules are the approved ways of answering your question, how, and who, gets to be suitably qualified to ask testing questions, and even what sort of questions are appropriate to ask. This is a tremendously important insight: If paradigm governs not just answers, but what questions may be asked, who may ask them and how they should be framed, then the job of ensuring theories satisfactorily answer all questions asked of them becomes quite a lot easier. In this way, scientific research itself can only develop by reference to the paradigm, and not the other way around: observation is theory-dependent.

A paradigm thus has “exclusive jurisdiction” over its own subject matter. One can only pronounce on a scientific problem once one has been fully inducted into it: biologists will not take seriously the biological assertions of derivatives lawyers, or religious clerics, for example. Clerics who take biology exams and refuse to renounce their religious beliefs will fail, and thereby will never be able to authoritatively comment on biological matters. But the same thing would happen if Richard Dawkins entered the seminary. So plenty of scope — need, even — for cognitive dissonance.

Now some things to note here. None of this is malicious, requires a conspiracy, involves the wanton suppression of dissident voices: these defences of the sacred texts of the organisation are a basic means of ensuring the organisation, such as it is, has continuity and longevity. If any random can kick away any pillar of the edifice, no matter how structurally important, your paradigm cannot grow and will not survive. These are basic survival mechanisms. The more sophisticated the paradigm becomes, the more precious do those foundational propositions become. String theory, for example, is a young discipline, has not yet fully covered and has very few common axioms, there is still much debate about all of them, and all are more or less expendable. Newton’s basic laws of mechanics, on the other hand, are so deeply embedded that they inform much contiguous science to this day even though they were falsified a century ago. The effort of re-writing the entire scientific canon to accommodate mathematics which is far harder than newtons, and which for the most part makes almost no difference, is just not worth the effort.

The universality of paradigms

Now, as buzzword-brandishing MBAs amply illustrate, the intellectual concept of a paradigm is by no means confined to scientific discovery. Indeed, it has something of the “universal acid” of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea about it — once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you start seeing it everywhere. Religious orders function in exactly the same way. So do political ones. So do lawyers. So do industry associations. So do other academic disciplines. So do sports clubs. So, does any social organisation with a common goal. It has this “universal acidity” because paradigms arise from an evolutionary process. The community that constitutes a paradigm evolves to be the way it is. It gradually iterates over time. This is the universal acid.

See also

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions