A Fish Thinking About Water: Revealing the Paradigms of Our Disciplines


Brief Description: This assignment asks students to identify a central or highly significant paradigm of their discipline, describe how it functions to create problem-solving strategies, and describe the paradigm that it has replaced, gathering information from both interviews and library sources.

Contributed by Richard Kahn, Bloomsburg University
Email: rkahn@csiu.org

A Fish Thinking About Water: Revealing the Paradigms of Our Disciplines

[Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are] almost always ... either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change .... These are the men [and women] who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.
Thomas S. Kuhn

When Copernicus's vision of a heliocentric system became accepted, astronomy was revolutionized. The earlier geocentric system collapsed under the weight of all the data it could not explain, and many problems and ideas that it had considered important lost meaning. The heliocentric model became the new paradigm, "a pattern that orders the observations, approaches and problem-solving strategies of a discipline."

Your assignment is to reveal a central or highly significant paradigm of your discipline or major. You need to identify what that paradigm is, describe how it functions to create problem-solving strategies (the work that one in the discipline does), and what paradigm it replaced. This last, a contrast that reveals the importance of the new paradigm, may be an organizing principle for your writing.

A paradigm is, in one sense, the authority of the discipline because it is the consensus of its practicioners. It is the way that one in that discipline speaks, focuses attention, decides what is significant. Furthermore, it is invisible to the best trained because it has become second nature or common sense, yet it is not nature nor has it always been common. The paradigm can usually be traced back to one of the big names (like Copernicus) and a struggle to supplant the older paradigm.

Begin your research by asking your professors and cite this as an interview. Follow the leads that interview provides to the library, because you will need other words than only your own and citations describing both the present paradigm as well as the one it supplanted.