Nature - autonomous learning

30 strange naturesBox 1.6 PARADIGMSThe term ‘paradigm’ is famously associated with the historianof science Thomas Kuhn (1962). A paradigm is defined as ‘theworking assumptions, procedures and findings routinely acceptedby a group of scholars, which together define a stable patternof [research] . . . activity’ (Johnston et al. 2000: 571). According toKuhn, scholars in any academic discipline can be identified by theparadigm to which they subscribe. This implies that paradigmsorganise the way any given researcher investigates the world. Thisranges from that researcher’s philosophical beliefs (i.e. theirassumptions about the nature of reality and how we can come toknow that reality) to the specific laws, models and theories that theyemploy, to the specific investigative methods they favour, to thekinds of research questions they ask, to the kinds of real-worldthings they choose to study.In geography, there was a fair amount of debate in the 1980sover whether and how the paradigm idea can help us to understandwhat geography researchers do. I don’t want to revisit thosedebates here. I simply want to use the term ‘paradigm’ as a heuristicdevice to get student readers to recognise two things. The firstis that paradigms are often what Kuhn called ‘incommensurable’.In other words, paradigms are different ‘worldviews’ or ‘languages’that cannot be readily translated into the terms of another. Thismeans that, within any academic disciplines (like geography), onefinds researchers investigating often the same aspects of the worldbut in radically different ways. Second, in principle, one or otherparadigm can be dominant in a discipline at any moment in time.However, it’s fair to say that no one paradigm is dominant inhuman geography. Though human geography is often described asa ‘social science’ this does not mean that one scientific approachdominates the field. Instead, one finds everything from Marxist tofeminist to more scientific (or ‘positivist’) perspectives vying fordominance. Things are different in physical geography, where abroadly ‘scientific’ approach is accepted, even if it’s far from homo-