What is “paradigm”?
Erek Göktürk
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Postbox 1080 Blindern 0316 Oslo, Norway erek@ifi.uio.no
Abstract. Today, the word “paradigm” is being used with a vague definition. In this paper, an attempt at clarifying the meaning of the word “paradigm” is made, with reference to its philosophical roots and how it came to its proliferation of use.
1. Introduction
The last decades witnessed a proliferation of the use of the word “paradigm”, in connection with many subjects. But the question still runs unnoticed: What exactly is “paradigm? And where did it come from? This paper is an attempt to put together answers to these two questions.
The word surely escaped from the laboratory of philosophers, mostly due to the fact that its meaning is vague. Kuhn’s use of it as an inherited set of preconceptions, acting as a darkened glass from which we perceive the world, gave the word a mystic aura. Then it was only a natural consequence for everyone and anyone who are to make a claim in changing the way the world goes around to come about advocating their point of view as “the new paradigm” which gets rid of the “blinding effects of the previous one”! So the word’s popularity has grown in direct proportion to the watering down of its meaning, which was never exactly concrete to start with, and has grown thinner with every new use [7].
2. Etymology
Here are two definitions of paradigm, from two different dictionaries:
Paradigm 1. One that serves as a pattern or model.
2. A set or list of all the inflectional forms of a word or of one of its grammaticalcategories: the paradigm of an irregular verb.
3. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way ofviewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline. [1]
Paradigm 1. An example; a model; a pattern.
2. (Gram.) An example of a conjugation or declension, showing a word in all itsdifferent forms of inflection.
3. (Rhet.) An illustration, as by a parable or fable. [2]
From these definitions, we may assert that the words “model” and “pattern” goes well with the meaning of a paradigm, even the word “example”. Although this type of definition correlates the meanings of these words with the meaning of paradigm, it does not describe its meaning. The meaning in the domain of grammar studies seems also more or less well-established, being almost the same in the two dictionaries. The third ones are not even related. It also interesting that the third meaning given in the second definition makes the word ‘paradigm’ stand in close connection to ‘allegory’.
So the dictionaries fall short of being a source from which we can learn about the concept of “paradigm”.
An etymological analysis shows us that the word comes from the latin word ‘paradigma’, and appears in Greek as ‘paradeigma’, whose English translation is ‘example’, or as its earlier form ‘paradeiknunai’. The prefix ‘para-‘ meaning ‘alongside’, and ‘deiknunai’ meaning ‘to show,’ so the two words together sound as ‘alongside shown’ or ‘what shows itself beside’ [3]. But what is it that we “show alongside” or that “appears alongside”?