Question

Explain the relationship between theory and paradigm.

Answer 1

There are many different definitions of paradigm and theory, and I will only present here some of them with which I mainly agree.
First Kuhn (1962) used the term paradigm to describe normal science. However Masterman (1970) documented twenty-one different meanings of the term “paradigm” in Kuhn’s work , but Kuhn himself eventually distinguished between two principal meanings: “On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or as examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science” (Kuhn, 1970). The notion that we advance here differs slightly from those formulated by Kuhn. It actually addresses the following question: how do we move from experienced phenomena to the scientific object as defined by Gilles-Gaston Granger (1994)? For this philosopher, “the complex life experience grasped in the experience of sensitive things has become the object of a mechanics and a physics, for example, when the idea was conceived of reducing it to an abstract model, initially comprising only spatiality, time, and ‘resistance’ to motion.” And he recognizes that this object does not benefit at the outset from an explicit and general definition of its content. For instance, sciences such as physics and biology perform successive elaborations of their objects, as illustrated by the transition from Newton’s physics to Einstein’s general relativity. Likewise, demography has spelled out its object by means of successive paradigms, which specified various kinds of relationships between the observed phenomena and the scientific object (Courgeau and Franck, 2007).
Boudon (1970)distinguished between "theories in the strict meaning of the term" and paradigms or "theories in the broad meaning of the term". The strict meaning of theory corresponds to the notion of a hyothetically deductive system and is more resricted than the large one. I mainly agree with this distinction.