Paper Topic:

a critique of Kuhn`s concept of the paradigm

Running Head : Kuhn 's Concept of Paradigm

Kuhn 's Concept of Paradigm

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Introduction

Thomas Kuhn 's concept of the paradigm has greatly influenced the way that ideas and concepts evolve . Although his ideas were largely applied to the history of science , his concept of paradigm is also applicable to other branches of study such as philosophy and the social sciences among others . Kuhn (1962 ) showed that science is not merely an accumulation of knowledge . Rather , there are different periods of revolution , which

he called paradigm shifts

During these paradigm shifts , the main ideas about science and the processes governing scientific inquiry change dramatically . He said that science can be understood through three stages . The first one is pre-science , which does not have an over-arching paradigm . Prescience is succeeded by normal science , which is characterized by the attempts of scientists to develop and expand the central paradigm through the process of solving a problem , usually characterized as a puzzle

The paradigm takes into account several variables and factors and seeks to explain different phenomena in the world . When there are anomalous results , meaning that there are results , which cannot be sufficiently explained by the dominant paradigm , and they accumulate , there develops a point of crisis . The old paradigm can no longer deal with new variables and new trends , hence there emerges a new paradigm , which takes into account the older one and successfully deals with the factors that cannot be explained away by the old paradigm . The anomalous results will then be integrated into the new framework alongside the old one

Kuhn 's work is a revolutionary one . But what exactly is a paradigm ? How useful is this concept ? What evidences does he present in discussing this concept

Paradigm

A paradigm is more than just a theory it refers to a whole worldview that establishes the relationships between and among different variables in the system (Kuhn , 1962 . This is because a theory is more limited in nature and scope . Although his use of the term paradigm has been criticized as vague and ambiguous , he attempted to use the term disciplinary matrix instead (Forster , 1998

Kuhn criticized the adherents of science because of the claim that science is cumulative and that it is advancing toward a certain end . In fact , he even went as far as to claim that science textbooks is misleading and usually relies on history . Kuhn calls history and the occurrence of previous discoveries as normal science - the kind that has already established its tenets and other set of beliefs and assumptions (Neyens Gardner , 2007

Through this discussion , Kuhn presented several characteristics of his concept of the paradigm . One is that the paradigm should be unprecedented , which means that the old paradigm should not have taken into account the features of the new paradigm . The new paradigm should also be an open system so that different scientists will be able to work with its building blocks of ideas and deal with a number...

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