In science, paradigm () describes distinct concepts or thought patterns in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context.

Thomas S. Kuhn used Bachelard's notion of " epistemological rupture " ( coupure or rupture épistémologique ) as re-interpreted by Alexandre Koyré to develop his theory of paradigm shifts ; Althusser, Georges Canguilhem ( his successor at the Sorbonne ) and Michel Foucault also drew upon Bachelard's epistemology.

While Kuhn's paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault's epistemes are something like the ' epistemological unconscious ' of an era ; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it.

A paradigm in this technical sense, however, is not a way of thinking as it is in the epistemological meaning.

During the 1970s and 1990s, there was an epistemological shift away from the positivist traditions that had largely informed the discipline.

In ' Postmodernist Fiction ' ( 1987 ), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.

Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the " epistemological break " between the " young Marx " and the " mature Marx " was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a " scientific theory " of society.

Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.

Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge.

Strictly speaking, neither empiricism nor rationalism is necessarily committed to foundationalism ( it is possible to be an empiricist coherentist, for example, and that was a common epistemological position in 20th century philosophy ).

Plato was therefore a metaphysical and epistemological dualist, an outlook that modern idealism has striven to avoid: Plato's thought cannot therefore be counted as idealist in the modern sense.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children.

On this background, ongoing work in the sociology of scientific knowledge ( SSK ) and the history and philosophy of science ( HPS ) was able to assert its epistemological consequences, leading most notably to the establishment of the " Strong Programme " at the University of Edinburgh.

A second influence on Durkheim's view of society beyond Comte's positivism was the epistemological outlook called social realism.

Aquinas placed more emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing.

Pike's innovation was to turn away from an epistemological debate, and turn instead to a methodological solution.

Ghazali's crisis of epistemological skepticism was resolved by " a light which God Most High cast into my breast ... the key to most knowledge.

Descartes aim was to find epistemological certainty ( certainty in knowledge ) and part of his project was to prove the existence of an immaterial soul.

His criticism of Wolff influenced Immanuel Kant at the time when his system was forming ; and his ethical, as well as epistemological, doctrines are cited in the inaugural dissertation and Critique of Practical Reason.

Where the Critique of Pure Reason laid out Kant's metaphysical and epistemological ideas, this relatively short, primarily meta-ethical, work was intended to outline and define the concepts and arguments shaping his future work The Metaphysics of Morals.

James ' epistemological model of truth was that which works in the way of belief, and a belief was true if in the long run it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world.

The criteria of acceptation or rejectal of a ' marxist ' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as ' epistemological ' or as ' philosophical ': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a communist policy, or not.

In effect, Althusser stressed that the epistemological break was not an event, which could be chronologically located ( in this or that book of Marx ) and thus definitively separated science from ideology.

Instead, this epistemological break was a process that had to be endlessly renewed, thus explaining revisionist tentatives to break away from this progress and renew with the old protoscientific ( and " bourgeois ") theory, which ignored the social and historical conditions which made human society what it is.

He accepted epistemological idealism but, unlike Berkeley, Hegel, Royce, or Bosanquet, was not prepared to take the extra step to ontological idealism.

Russell was ultimately concerned with establishing sound epistemological foundations.

Kuhn's and Foucault's notions are both influenced by the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard's notion of an " epistemological rupture ", as indeed was Althusser.

Decisive in distinguishing Buddhism from what is commonly called Hinduism is the issue of epistemological justification.

His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called " genetic epistemology ".

As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual ’ s “ lived experience .” Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl ’ s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing.

His externalist epistemology, called " Proper functionalism ", is a form of epistemological reliabilism.

Confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is attributed to Willard van Orman Quine's extension of Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination as to physical theory, Quine's extension of underdetermination to all knowledge claims, since no theory of any type can be tested in isolation, but only embedded on a background of innumerable and often undetermined factors.

Kant's " epistemological phenomenalism ", as it has been called, is therefore quite distinct from Berkeley's earlier ontological version.

A benchmark in Royce ’ s career and thought occurred when he returned to California to speak to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, and ostensibly to defend his concept of God from the criticisms of George Holmes Howison, Joseph Le Conte, and Sidney Mezes, a meeting the New York Times called “ a battle of the giants .” There Royce offered a new modal version of his proof for the reality of God based upon ignorance rather than error, based upon the fragmentariness of individual existence rather than its epistemological uncertainty.

The epistemological learning aspect, or, as Suzuki called it, the “ mother tongue ” philosophy, is that in which children learn through their own observation of their environment.

In his early epistemological system, which he called Radical Conventionalism, Ajdukiewicz analyzed any language as a set of expressions or sentences, with inferential rules of meaning that specify the relation of one expression to another, or to external data.

It combines the central tenets of virtue theory ( also called “ virtue ethics ”), with classical epistemological approaches.

These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included ; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic.

A recent development, for example, is the field called Epistemics of Divine Reality which deals exclusively with the epistemological problems surrounding the knowledge of God. Other issues in philosophical theology proper are issues related to the nature of God and His relation to the world.

Under the epistemological view called foundationalism, basic beliefs ( also commonly called foundational beliefs ) are the axioms of a belief system.

Research on perceptions of science among the American public conclude that most religious groups see no general epistemological conflict with science and they have no differences with nonreligious groups in the propensity of seeking out scientific knowledge, although there may be epistemic or moral conflicts when scientists make counterclaims to religious tenets.

Descartes thought that only knowledge of eternal truths including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences could be attained by reason alone ; other knowledge, the knowledge of physics, required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method.

Due to its artifactual nature, psychiatric comorbidity has been considered as a Kuhnian anomaly leading the DSM to a scientific crisis and a comprehensive review on the matter considers comorbidity as an epistemological challenge to modern psychiatry.

It is generally accepted that the concept of scientific validity addresses the nature of reality and as such is an epistemological and philosophical issue as well as a question of measurement.

Philosophers of science argue over the epistemological limits of such a consensus and some, including Thomas Kuhn, have pointed to the existence of scientific revolutions in the history of science as being an important indication that scientific consensus can, at times, be wrong.

Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge.

He has pioneered the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of science, the logarithmic retardation theory of scientific progress based on the epistemological principle that our knowledge in a field does not increase in proportion with the volume of information but only with its logarithm.

From the standpoint of enlightened science, the limit or boundary of different epistemological fields needs to be enumerated or well defined, i. e., in this case, the binaries like Folk language / language, folk-art / non-folk-art, Folksong / Classical song, Folk drama / theatre must be distinguished according to the existing enlightened “ scientific ” logic.

Around the same period, in 1935, Ludwik Fleck, a Polish medical microbiologist published his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact which used a case study in the field of medicine ( of the development of the disease concept of Syphilis ) to present a thesis about the social nature of knowledge, and in particular science and scientific ' thought styles ' ( Denkstil ) which are the epistemological, conceptual and linguistic styles of scientific ( but also non-scientific ) ' thought collectives ' ( Denkkollektiv ).

Today, scholarly accounts of Durkheim's positivism may be vulnerable to exaggeration and oversimplification: Comte was the only major sociological thinker to postulate that the social realm may be subject to scientific analysis in the same way as noble science, whereas Durkheim acknowledged in greater detail the fundamental epistemological limitations.

The fundamental task for the philosophy of social science has thus been to question the extent to which positivism may be characterized as ' scientific ' in relation to fundamental epistemological foundations.

In other words, economics is unwilling to adhere to the epistemological principles which distinguish scientific from other types of intellectual activity because this might jeopardize the position of economists within the larger society as the defender of the dominant faith.