THE PRIORITY OF PARADIGMS

THE PRIORITY OF PARADIGMSRules were derived from paradigms but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules.What is a PARADIGM?

PARADIGM

A philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific discipline.

An example or model.

Standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications.

The paradigm of a mature scientific community can be determined with relative ease.

Reason :

- The determination of shared paradigm is not the determination of shared rules.The rules used by scientists who share a paradigm are not so easily determined.

Reasons :

Scientists disagree on the interpretation of a paradigm.

The existence of a paradigm does not imply that any full set of rules exist.

Scientists are guided by tacit knowledge.These are the knowledge acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly.

- The attributes shared by a paradigm are not always readily apparent.Paradigms maybe prior to, more binding, and more complete than any rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them.

Paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules.

There is severe difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular normal scientific tradition.

Paradigms can determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules or shared assumptions.

Reasons :

It is very difficult to discover the rules that guide particular normal science traditions.

Scientists never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves.

They generally learn these through applications.

New theory is taught in tandem with its application to a concrete range of phenomena.A paradigm can determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive.

Reason:Although a single paradigm may serve many scientific groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all.

Subspecialties are different educated and focus on different applications for their research findings.Changes in a paradigm can affect different subspecialties differently.

A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessary extend to the others as well.