Paradigms

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

"acategories.asp?Author=Flannery+O%27Connor+%281925%2D1964%29"

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

"acategories.asp?Author=Albert+Einstein+%281879%2D1955%29"

everyone since the

beginning fo time has had their own views and standards for the way that everything around them should be. these views are seemingly set in stone and unchangeable. there are many examples in the past of terrible consequences for expressing views other than the norm at the time. more recently this apprehension to change was described by Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revoulutions.

Kuhn’s book was focused on the scientific world. He said that normal science “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements

, achievements

thatsome particular scientific community aacknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (Kuhn 10). These achievements

needed to be unprecedented and open-ended so as to attract a group away from competing ideas and to leave all sorts of problems for this group to resolve. these achievements

are called paradigms. a paradigm is defined by Kuhn as “an accepted canon of scientific practice, including laws, theory, applications, and instrumentation, that provides a model for a particular coherent tradition of scientific research” (Trigger 5).

When results arise that cannot be explained through the current paradigm, a new paradigm may begin to form. the new paradigm originates with new theories that are proposed as a result of the anomalies that were found. “to be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted” (Kuhn 17-18). when the new paradigm is finally accepted, a paradigm-shift occurs. the paradigm shift represents Kuhn’s “scientific revolution”. Once the paradigm-shift is completed normal science returns under the new paradigm until new set of unexplainable facts arise.

paradigms help scientific communities to bind their discipline in that they help the scientist to do several things. they help to create avenues fo inquiry, formulate questions, select methods with which to examine questions and define areas fo relevance. Kuhn writes “In the absence fo a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (Kuhn 15). what he was trying to show was that there must be a way to limit the direction of one’s research based on what is considered to be known from the past. in this way a paradigm is essential to scientific inquiry. “No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evalutation, and critisism” (Kuhn 16-17).

Although paradigms are helpful in many ways, they can also be very dangerous. the very nature of a paradigm can slow or even keep valuable information from being accepted. it is hard for people set in their ways to accept an idea that is completly different. science is more concerned with confirming already established theories, or paradigm, than with facing new evidence. this is also true for otheraspects of life. for example, the paradigm that prevented the Swiss from acepting a new kind of watch that later became the norm in watch making. their lack of acceptance essentially ended Swiss dominance in the watch-making world.

Another example from the past is Ptolemeian astronomy. this was the idea that the earth was the center fo the universe and that all observable heavenly bodies revolved around it. at first followers of heliocentric astronomy could not better prove their view and were not given much credit. later ptolemeian astronomy became too complex in trying to explain astronomical anomalies

in their findings. at this point heliocentric astronomy became the accepted paradigm. (Moloney)

An example of a paradigm in archaeology is that of Processual archaeology or New archaeology. thisparadigm tends to view archaeology as a scientific discipline with an approach based on ecological and materialist views of culture. processual archaeologists emphasize the adaptive aspects of culture by examining its most visible parts-subsistence, technology and social organization. One of the goals of this paradigm is to seek broad, cross-cultural regularities that reflect short term-adaptive behaviors