ABSTRACT
paradigm. The term paradigm has become very widely used indeed in contemporary literature on the philosophy of both natural science and social science, largely as a result of the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, in which it occupies a prominent place. A notion of paradigm was however earlier applied to sociology by Robert K. Merton. He used the term in a prescriptive sense, to codify programmes of research in sociology: a paradigm, for Merton, is an explicitly stated set of concepts and propositions used to guide research investigation within a specific area. Kuhn’s usage is quite different from this, and was originally applied to the natural sciences in the context of a contrast with social science. Paradigms in natural science are ‘universally recognised scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’ (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revised edition, p. viii). Research carried out within a paradigm constitutes ‘normal science’. The social sciences, in which battles about fundamental issues are still chronic, according to Kuhn are in a pre-paradigmatic state.
