Frank Kogan

Oh great.

So I've been saying that, by Kuhn's more narrow of his two fundamental uses of the word "paradigm," a paradigm is a model, or as he puts it more dully, an "exemplar." And, for instance, in the preface (1977) to his first collection of pieces, The Essential Tension, when he discusses how he came up with the term "paradigm" in 1959 and explains what scientists do with paradigms, he says, "they could model their own subsequent research on them." So there it is, "model" in its verb form, on p. xix.

So then, on pp 297 and 298 of that book, in an essay entitled "Second Thoughts On Paradigms" (1974), Kuhn differentiates among "symbolic generalizations," "models," and "exemplars," telling us that the latter is what he originally meant by "paradigm." So - I don't know if just for the moment, in that essay, or as a more general practice - he's using "model" to mean something different from "exemplar."

Models, about which I shall have nothing further to say in this paper, are what provide the group with preferred analogies or, when deeply held, with an ontology. At one extreme they are heuristic: the electric circuit may fruitfully be regarded as a steady-state hydrodynamic system, or a gas behaves like a collection of microscopic billiard balls in random motion. At the other, they are the objects of metaphysical commitment: the heat of a body is the kinetic energy of its constituent particles, or, more obviously metaphysical, all perceptible phenomena are due to the motion and interaction of qualitatively neutral atoms in the void.

(First definition of "heuristic" from the American Heritage Dictionary (first edition): "Helping to discover or learn; guiding or furthering investigation: 'the historian discovers the past by the judicious use of such a heuristic device as the "ideal type"' (Karl J. Weintraub).")

I'm still not giving you what Kuhn says about exemplars, since I don't yet want that to get in the way of what you think such creatures might be, but when he brings up paradigms/exemplars a few pages later (p. 305) in the very same essay he once again talks of scientists modeling further investigations on paradigms, by which he means examples not analogies.

The Essential Tension, unlike The Road Since Structure and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has an index, so I looked up "model" (at the end of its listing we're instructed to "See also Paradigms, as standard examples" and at "exemplar" the index doesn't even list page numbers but again instructs us to "See Paradigms, as standard examples"). If the index is accurate (which I already know it isn't, since under "model" it leaves out pp 297 and 298), the use of "model" as analogy that he gives us on pp 297 and 298 appears nowhere else in the book, whereas "model" in its verb form, as what scientists do with exemplars - they model subsequent work on exemplars - appears yet more times. (But "model" as analogy does appear once in "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" in that passage Mark uncovered which refers to the hydrodynamic "model" of resistance. I doubt that, in the sense of scientists modeling something on something else, there's a clear distinction to be drawn between how you use an example and how you use an analogy.) And intriguingly, under "model," the index directs us to the passage in 1959 where Kuhn first introduced the term "paradigm," even though that passage doesn't use the word "model."

Anyhow, I don't think I've steered you wrong by saying that a paradigm, in its narrow sense, is a model. The reason "model" keeps appearing in its verb form when paradigms are mentioned is that "model" is the best available word. But at times Kuhn is trying to hone in on a particular type of model.