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system, the Aristotelian theory of movement in favour of Galileo’s paradigm,and subsequently that of Newton, and Stahl’s phlogiston paradigm in favour ofthe new paradigm of Lavoisier and Priestly.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaParadigms in the social sciencesKuhn’s use of the term paradigm, and the supporting theory of paradigms hashad a major impact on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.Following Kuhn’s historical analysis of the physical sciences, a veritable floodof studies in which similar meta-analyses of the social sciences wereundertaken, appeared in the 1970s. Typically, the following questions wereaddressed: Where are the boundaries between paradigms? Which paradigm iscurrently the dominant one in a given discipline?Quite often the conclusion was reached that a given discipline accommodated avariety of competing paradigms. In this manner one would find structuralfunctionalism,symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, systems theory,Marxism, Neo-Marxism, and so on in sociology. In psychology one would, forexample, be able to identify psycho-analytic, systems theoretical,behaviouristic, and phenomenological paradigms. In a similar manner it wouldbe possible to quote a variety of examples from each discipline (see alsoSuggestions for further reading).A typical strategy in publications in which the aim is the identification anddiscussion of paradigms in the social sciences, is to compare the natural andsocial sciences using Kuhn’s theory of paradigms as a point of departure.Almost inevitably, the conclusion is then reached that the social sciences arestill in a pre-paradigmatic phase of development because of the fact that thereis no discipline in which there is a single dominant paradigm. The conclusionis reached that all these disciplines remain at a phase of relative immaturity. Asfar as we are concerned, this strategy is unacceptable because the conceptparadigm is used out of context. Kuhn attaches the concept very strongly to thefunction of problem solving: a function that has a clear and specific meaning inthe natural sciences. Even a fairly superficial study of the traditions andschools in the social sciences would readily indicate that problem solving is notas central an epistemic goal in the social sciences as it is in the naturalsciences. Goals such as an in-depth understanding, explanation, analysis, andinterpretation are more common. It is, therefore, quite obvious that the socialsciences will not compare favourably with the natural sciences as long as atypically natural science standard is used as yardstick for such comparisons.For this reason, it is only acceptable to use the concept paradigm in a moremetaphorical sense when it is applied to the social sciences than one would doin the case of natural sciences.The model of the practice of the social sciences in Chapter 1 is, as we indicatedat that stage, an attempt to make some of the components of Kuhn’s150