2.

Paradigms and paradigm shifts

 History of sciences: An academic discipline dealing with science,

technology, medicine, and their interactions with society – in a historical context.
One of the founders of this discipline is Thomas Kuhn and he was interested in
the ways scientific changes happen.
 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: understanding of the relationship
between continuity and discontinuity in academia, the fact that there are
sometimes gradual changes and occasionally there are drastic shifts of methods
used within disciplines.
 Gradual process of accumulating knowledge: A progress through which
scientists would come closer to truth, and if needed, they would correct previous
errors.
Kuhnian’s explanation distinguishes between two phases in the development of
science:

1. Normal Phrase: work similarly to the pre-Kuhnian understanding,

- characterized by puzzle solving and accumulating knowledge.

2. Revolutionary Phases: not cumulative, but phases when a whole previous system of
explanations, a paradigm, is questioned and eventually replaced by a new one.

- Paradigms include the shared theoretical beliefs, values, methods and techniques of a
field, in other words the disciplinary matrix.

- Anomalies are findings that are troubling, inadequate or inexplicable within a paradigm.
When anomalies become too numerous and too serious to disregard, revolutionary phases
are triggered, and the old paradigm is eventually discarded.

- A crisis settles in when the confidence in the existing theory or method is shattered.

Once a new paradigm is established, explaining the former anomalies, some previously
explained phenomena that made sense in the previous paradigm may remain
unexplained. The fact that not all former achievements are preserved in a new paradigm is
called the Kuhn–loss.
Disciplines by nature have two conflicting characteristics, they are necessarily
conservative, since this is required for the institutional continuity maintaining them, they
are also characterized by the impetus for innovation of the younger generation of
researchers. These two characteristics create a conflict that is called essential tension.
Illustrating a paradigm shift is the Copernican revolution.
In Copernicus’s time people believed that the Center of the physical universe was the
Earth, and all the celestial bodies revolved around it. This model is called the
geocentric or Ptolemaic model.
Copernicus discovered that the Center of the universe was not the Earth, but the Sun –
the heliocentric model. Copernicus agreed to publish his hypothesis in a work entitled
On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres in 1543. Partly because of the censorship of
the Church, it took several decades until Copernicus’s theory became a paradigm.

Epistemological implications: doubts about the way knowledge is possible. Potentially

all paradigm shifts raise such questions, since it is not only the previous paradigm that
they shatter, but the reliability of any knowledge.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, a branch of philosophy concerned with the
nature and scope of knowledge. Its primary questions are the following: "What is
knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know
what we know?"
We may view the study of English as a field where diverse paradigms have succeeded
each other, or coexisted with one another.
- At the time when English gradually became a discipline, in the second half of the 19 th
century, studying English meant primarily studying literature.
- Dealing with English understood as dealing with literature in a way that one puts down
one’s impressions cannot be regarded as a paradigm.
- The study of literature became professionalized when writing about literature became a
systematic study: professional criticism.

- New Criticism brought important change in the middle of the 20 th century that we may
call (although not in the strict Kuhnian sense) a new paradigm in the study of literature with
stressed focus on formal, rhetorical aspects of a literary work of art, such as ambiguity, plot
or imagery – elements that they found and examined in the texts themselves.
- This was a clear break with former approaches that looked for interpretive clues outside
the works rather than in the texts, for example in the biographies of authors in an approach
called biographical criticism.

The term criticism may have the following meanings:

1) finding faults
2) analysing
3) interpreting to understand
4) evaluating to establish worth

- Today the most frequent meanings used in the context of English studies are analyzing
and interpreting. In this sense criticism does not mean finding faults with in a negative
sense, rather analyzing and interpreting with the aim to understand the work and establish
its meaning.
- Critic: a person who is professionally engaged in the analysis and interpretation of works
of art
-Critique: review, an essay or article that gives a critical evaluation (as of a book or play)