Paradigm

In the vocabulary Thomas Kuhn set out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, a paradigm is the shared set of theories, standard methods, instruments and exemplary solved problems that a scientific community accepts as the basis for its ordinary work, and that tells its members what counts as a meaningful question and an acceptable answer. Kuhn also called this shared framework a discipline's disciplinary matrix. Scientists working inside an established paradigm carry out what Kuhn termed normal science, treating the paradigm's basic commitments as settled and directing their effort at solving the specific puzzles it defines, rather than testing the paradigm itself. A paradigm can be overturned in a scientific revolution when accumulated anomalies it cannot explain provoke a crisis and a rival paradigm emerges that resolves them.