ABSTRACT
Most people are used to thinking in terms of disciplines which study certain subjects, such as politics, economics, or the mind. A common source of anomalies is material generated in other disciplines, from outside the paradigm. Forcing a field’s theories to confront new issues, in other fields, can at a minimum expand the boundaries of formal subdisciplines. If one finds oneself being forced to abandon existing paradigms, the borders of scientific disciplines are good places to look for new ones. Sometimes both external “anomalies” and the contributions of other disciplines play a role. If scientists grow dissatisfied with paradigms, other subdisciplines can provide the new material with which to construct alternatives. Contraposing different perspectives can greatly illuminate a subject. The paradigmatic assumption that the indicative in independent clauses is the basic sentence structure across languages proved fruitful for comparative grammars and the study of basic word order, but had great difficulty explain anomalies such as verb placement rules in German.
