What do you think the term “paradigm” means in science?

What do you think the term “paradigm” means in science? What do you think the term “paradigm means in the field of psychology? To what do you attribute the similarities/differences?

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a paradigm is “a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated. ”  In our reading for the week, I came across this definition in our text.  Paradigm = “broad system of theoretical assumptions that a scientific community uses to make sense of their domain of study.”

I believe the term paradigm generally means a “school of thought,”  which the textbook uses that term as well.  A paradigm is basically an accepted view of the science.  For example, the text uses the example of chemistry — and how they have a paradigm that explains how atoms combine to form a molecule.  There is a difference in psychology.  In Chemistry and most other disciplines (except the social sciences) — almost everyone agrees on the basic paradigm of that science.

In Psychology, there are at least four different paradigms — psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and evolutionary.  According to the text, psychology “lacks a unified paradigm, but has a number of perspectives (schools of thought) that can be used to understand psychological events.”

I believe that psychology is different from most other “older” disciplines is that psychology is ever changing.  Every new research tells us something new — tells us something we have not known before.  In Chemistry, scientists know how atoms combine to make a molecule.  In Psychology, there are still avenues of research that are largely unexplored.  This area of possible learning and research is why I believe that psychology has no unified paradigm — scientists are trying to understand what new research is telling us, and trying to fit it into one of the different paradigms.  And honestly, psychology might take elements from each paradigm to find the true underlying paradigm that will govern psychology in the future.  Until that time, I believe the research in psychology will be great and we will learn things we never even knew existed!