Meaning of paradign?

Question

Meaning of paradign?

Answer 1

The word is paradigm, meaning a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind.

Answer 2

One that serves as a pattern or model.

A set or list of all the inflectional forms of a word or of one of its grammatical categories: the paradigm of an irregular verb.

A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

[Middle English, example, from Late Latin paradīgma, from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknunai, to compare : para-, alongside; see para–1 + deiknunai, to show.]

USAGE NOTE   Paradigm first appeared in English in the 15th century, meaning “an example or pattern,” and it still bears this meaning today: Their company is a paradigm of the small high-tech firms that have recently sprung up in this area. For nearly 400 years paradigm has also been applied to the patterns of inflections that are used to sort the verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech of a language into groups that are more easily studied. Since the 1960s, paradigm has been used in science to refer to a theoretical framework, as when Nobel Laureate David Baltimore cited the work of two colleagues that “really established a new paradigm for our understanding of the causation of cancer.” Thereafter, researchers in many different fields, including sociology and literary criticism, often saw themselves as working in or trying to break out of paradigms. Applications of the term in other contexts show that it can sometimes be used more loosely to mean “the prevailing view of things.” The Usage Panel splits down the middle on these nonscientific uses of paradigm. Fifty-two percent disapprove of the sentence The paradigm governing international competition and competitiveness has shifted dramatically in the last three decades.

Dental Dictionary: paradigm

A model or pattern. The set of values or concepts that represent an accepted way of doing things within an organization or community.

Geography Dictionary: paradigm

The prevailing pattern of thought in a discipline or part of a discipline. The paradigm provides rules about the type of problem which faces investigators and the way they should go about solving them. For geographers, for example, the paradigm would be referred to when questions such as ‘what is geography?’; ‘what are the legitimate areas of investigation for geographers?’; ‘how should geographers go about their investigations?’ are asked. Perhaps the most powerful paradigm for Western thinkers has been the ‘scientific method’.

Literary Dictionary: paradigm

paradigm [pa‐ră‐dym], in the general sense, a pattern or model in which some quality or relation is illustrated in its purest form; but in the terminology of structuralism, a set of linguistic or other units that can be substituted for each other in the same position within a sequence or structure. A paradigm in this sense may be constituted by all words sharing the same grammatical function, since the substitution of one for another does not disturb the syntax of a sentence.

Philosophy Dictionary: paradigm

In the philosophy of science the notion is associated with Kuhn's influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn suggests that certain scientific works, such as Newton's Principia or John Dalton's New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), provide an open-ended resource: a framework of concepts, results, and procedures within which subsequent work is structured. Normal science proceeds within such a framework or paradigm. A paradigm does not impose a rigid or mechanical approach, but can be taken more or less creatively and flexibly. The concept was influential in supplanting the positivist conception of science as an abstract, rationally and logically structured set of propositions. Kuhn's view emphasizes its concrete historical situation in the space of problems and approaches inherited from preceding achievements. A paradigm is only upset in periods of revolutionary science, typically arising in response to an accumulation of anomalies and stresses that cannot be resolved within its framework.

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