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MASTER_PARADIGM

                                             March   15, 2024
                                             January 19, 2026

Thomas Kuhn reacted with some bemusement and frustration
to much of the reaction to his "Structure of Scientific
Revolutions", and in the book "The Road Since Structure"
he essentially says that he's abandoned the term
"paradigm", letting go of it to let the world make
what it will of it.   He cites a paper by Margaret
Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm", commenting
with approval that she had identified 20-odd different
meanings of the term "paradigm" in use throughout
"Structure".

Consequently this paper by Masterman is very well-known
in some circles, but not as widely read as it might be
because it's just not that readily available.  I noted
some time ago that it was available in a library at
Berkely (and somewhat oddly one that focuses on
architecture and design), and it took me years
to get around to making a special trip there...

     Margaret Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm",
     _Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge_ (1970)         40 pages
     Proceedings of the International Colloquium            p59-p89
     of the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965,
     volume 4, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave


Going through Margaret Masterman's
list of different usages of the term
paradigm in Kuhn reveals immediately
that they're hardly distinct cases--

Kuhn was not being crazy in acting as though
all of these uses of the word were related
tightly enough to deserve the same word.

  I'm willing to believe Kuhn
  could have conflated a few     Myself, my
  things better left distinct,   original
  but I'd need to see that       reaction to
  spelled out.                   Kuhn's use of     If "paradigm" doesn't
                                 "paradigm" is     seem obscure to you it's
Margaret Masterman doesn't       that it was a     because it isn't now--
actually claim that her          little            Kuhn's usage has long
20-plus meanings for             obscure--         since become standard.
"paradigm" are distinct:
                                   As an alternative, I liked
"It is evident that not all        "intellectual framework".
these sense of 'paradigm' are
inconsistent with one another:          I'm not sure what Masterman would
some may even be elucidations           think of my synonym-- she's very
of others.  Nevertheless,               dismissive of ideas like "basic theory".
given the diversity, it is
obviously reasonable to ask:
'Is there anything in common
between all these sense?  Is
there, philosophically
speaking, anything definite or
general about the notion of a
paradigm which Kuhn is trying
to make clear?"

She goes on to try to group the 20-odd usages into
three categories, which don't strike me as very
compelling. Roughly, they're:

   "metaphysical",
   "sociological",
   "artifacts/constructs".


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