Kuhn 6 RESTARTED: Dick And Jane Examine Paradigms

Feb 01, 2009 11:29

[This is my previous Kuhn 6 thread RESTARTED, since that one quickly evolved into an off-topic mess, and on the off chance that some of the lurkers decide to start posting, I want them to have a clearer conversation to join. This doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained by looking at or joining the previous discussion, but I want to start the ( Read more... )

philosophy, relativism, thomas kuhn

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Oh great koganbot February 5 2009, 16:36:03 UTC
Oh great.

So I've been saying that, by Kuhn's more narrow of his two fundamental uses of the word "paradigm," a paradigm is a model, or as he puts it more dully, an "exemplar." And, for instance, in the preface (1977) to his first collection of pieces, The Essential Tension, when he discusses how he came up with the term "paradigm" in 1959 and explains what scientists do with paradigms, he says, "they could model their own subsequent research on them." So there it is, "model" in its verb form, on p. xix.

So then, on pp 297 and 298 of that book, in an essay entitled "Second Thoughts On Paradigms" (1974), Kuhn differentiates among "symbolic generalizations," "models," and "exemplars," telling us that the latter is what he originally meant by "paradigm." So - I don't know if just for the moment, in that essay, or as a more general practice - he's using "model" to mean something different from "exemplar."

Models, about which I shall have nothing further to say in this paper, are what provide the group with preferred analogies or, when ( ... )

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