ABSTRACT
The word ‘paradigm’ is just about the most over-used in the philosophical lexicon. In fact, professional philosophers tend to avoid it like the plague, and today it is much more commonly used by sociologists, scientists, and journalists such as Roger Lewin, quoted above. Part of the problem is that the word ‘paradigm’ is as slippery as the word ‘God’. Everyone who uses it means something slightly different. Too frequently the term is used as a propaganda tool, bolstering the pretensions of some supposed major breakthrough: paradigm founder today, Nobel prize winner tomorrow, burial in Westminster Abbey the day after that. All of this introduction is by way of explanation and (partial) apology. Several years ago when I first started thinking seriously about the paleontologists’ theory of punctuated equilibria, I expected the inevitable. Some enthusiast would be hailing the theory as a new ‘paradigm’, suggesting that all who did not jump on the bandwagon were blind to the brilliance of the new science and doomed to an early extinction. The intellectual community was just waiting for the hold-outs to the, so it could go about its new proper business without guilt. Nor, to my morbid satisfaction, was I long disappointed. Sure enough, I found paradigm status being claimed (Stidd 1980). The strong implication was that all those who belittled the new position (as did an eminent evolutionist of my acquaintance who contemptuously remarked: ‘Just hand-waving by the paleontologists, Mike!’) are simply irrational. All we were waiting for was the celebratory postage stamp.
