2. Paradigms and paradigm shifts

One of the founders of this discipline is Thomas Kuhn, who was interested in the ways scientific changes happen. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains his understanding of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in academia, in other words the fact that there are sometimes gradual changes and occasionally there are drastic shifts of methods used within disciplines.

The novelty in Kuhn’s explanation of scientific change lies in the following: previously this change was understood as a gradual process of accumulating knowledge, a progress through which scientists would come closer to truth, and if needed, they would correct previous errors. The Kuhnian explanation, on the other hand, distinguishes between two phases in the development of science: normal and revolutionary phases. Normal phases work similarly to the pre-Kuhnian understanding, characterized by puzzle solving and accumulating knowledge. Revolutionary phases are not cumulative, but phases when a whole previous system of explanations, a paradigm, is questioned and eventually replaced by a new one.

When anomalies become too numerous and too serious to disregard, revolutionary phases are triggered, and the old paradigm is eventually discarded.

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. On the one hand, they are necessarily conservative, since this is required for the institutional continuity maintaining them, but on the other hand 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.

An example 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 after the Greek scholar who described it. Copernicus discovered that the inaccuracies in the contemporary explanations about the movement of celestial bodies may be explained by the introduction of a new model, in which 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, a widely accepted view. Copernicus’s work was banned since it was thought that it contained views conflicting with the teaching of the Bible. It was difficult to accept its claims, since it restructured not only the whole known universe, but also the formerly central position of the human being.

Not all paradigm shifts have such far-reaching consequences outside the discipline in which they happen as the Copernican revolution. That was a particularly influential event, including 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.

These questions are treated not only by epistemology as a branch of philosophy, but are also frequently – although perhaps indirectly – addressed by literature and the arts. An early 17^th century poetic reaction to the epistemological change is the following excerpt:

“Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, all in relation.

Prince, subject, father, son are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he has got

To be a phoenix, and that then can be

None of that kind of which he is but he.”

 -- John Donne First Anniversary (1616)

How many ideas can you find in this short excerpt that are about relationships between elements of a system? What are these systems? How are these various contexts comparable? Note: the meaning of the expression “all in relation” in the second line is not identical to the present meaning!

As university students of English, you have to be aware of the fact that everything that is included in your curriculum is the result of the definition of English as a university subject – a definition that has changed with time, similarly to the way the scientific approach to topics connected to “serpents and dragons” has changed.

Some scholars are of the opinion that Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory does not apply to subjects within the humanities and thus to our field of studies, English. Others challenge the theory itself (For an example see MacIntyre’s essay in the recommended readings at the end of this lecture). Still, the theory provides a model for change within disciplines, and 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. It was necessary that some systematic approach is introduced in its methodology. 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. What is accepted as professional, however, depends on the governing paradigm. New Critics, for example – as it is discussed in more detail in part 2. – brought about an 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. Today, as you will see in Chapter 5, studying English is not restricted to literature only but is directed towards other media as well, including mass media, while studying literature is also expanded in its scope: it frequently means interpretations of texts from specific cultural perspectives – you can read more about this issue in Chapter 6.

Since the terms related to criticism may be confusing, let us have a look at their definitions.

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.

“Last night myself, Zhuangzi, dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly tlying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhuangzi. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhuangzi. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuangzi. But between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be a difference.”

Westerhoff, Jan Christoff. Reality. A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27.