During a lecture at a European graduate school of business (August 2002), Georgia Agamben: “This title ‘What is a Paradigm?’ seems to suggest that my presentation will focus on epistemological and methodological questions. I do not feel at all it is about these questions, I don’t like these kind of problems, I always have the impression, as once Heidegger put it, that we have here people busy sharpening knives when there is nothing left to cut.”

When Thomas Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Agamben observes, “Kuhn acknowledges having used the term paradigm in two different meanings. In the first one, paradigm designates what the members of a certain scientific community have in common, that is to say, the whole of techniques, patents and values shared by the members of the community. In the second sense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton’s Principia, which, acting as a common model or an example… stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation. Thus the question is for Kuhn to investigate by means of the paradigm what makes possible the constitution of what he calls “normal science”. That is to say, the science which can decide if a certain problem will be considered scientific or not. Normal science does not mean at all a science guided by a coherent system of rules, on the contrary, the rules can be derived from the paradigms, but the paradigms can guide the investigation also in the absence of rules. This is precisely the second meaning of the term paradigm, which Kuhn considered the most new and profound, though it is in truth the oldest.”

Here’s what Kuhn has to say: Paradigms are “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers.” (Page X of the 1996 edition). A paradigm describes:

o What is to be observed and scrutinized.
o The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject.
o How these questions are to be structured.
o How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted.

“In short, a paradigm is a comprehensive model of understanding that provides a field’s members with viewpoints and rules on how to look at the field’s problems and how to solve them. Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.”