Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 2: What is a Paradigm?
Each of the aforementioned theories of the "Stalinist terror" pretends to be more or less scientific in the sense of being logical and having an empirical basis. They actually arise as paradigms of Soviet society. For readers unfamiliar with this important concept, a paradigm in this sense is not to be confused with paradigms in grammar. Students of Italian, for example, must memorize "parlo, parli, parla" (I speak, you speak, he speaks) as a model for conjugating the verb parlare (to speak), so that, on this pattern, they can conjugate many other verbs, like suonare (to play music): "suono, suoni, suona" (I play, you play, he plays). Paradigm has been a favorite term in linguistics, in which it has other meanings - slightly different from the idea of a grammatical paradigm exemplified here - that go back to the Genevan linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857). Another technical use of the term paradigm is for grid-like tables that display classificatory systems, usually of kinship or lexical information, such as showing that an adult male chicken is a "cock," an adult male turkey a "tom," an adolescent female chicken a "pullet," etc. These meanings of paradigm are all different from that which is relevant here, and are mentioned not for the sake of explaining them but rather in order to distinguish them from the use introduced by Thomas S. Kuhn in his influential little book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
There is a common core of meaning to Kuhn’s - and the other - uses of the term, however. In each use, a paradigm is a kind of model to be copied. In the sense used by Kuhn it is a model of scientific practice that draws adherents and launches a coherent scientific tradition of thought, research, rules, and experiment, such as Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian dynamics, or Einsteinian space-time physics. These are large, grandiose paradigms, but scientific - or any - paradigms may be more narrow and specialized than these, like the corpuscular theory of optics (due to Newton), or the wave-mechanical theory of matter (due to de Broglie). Students of history and science are often charmed to see illustrations from manuscripts hundreds of years old which show the human eye emanating rays which strike and thereby "illuminate" objects at which they are directed by the eye, thereby supposedly enabling humans to see. This defunct theory of vision is a type of specialized paradigm of sight.
Just before the time of Ben Franklin, many electricians - as students of electricity in the English-speaking world then called themselves - began to think of electricity as some sort of fluid, because it was discovered that electrically charged bodies would not only attract and repel one another, but that electricity could also be conducted from one body to another by a "plumbing" connection, like Ben Franklin’s famous kite wire. It was this paradigm of "electricity as a fluid" - now abandoned and superseded by a different paradigm of electricity as "the motion of free electrons, which are normally bound to atoms and molecules" - that led to the construction and experimentation with the famous Leyden jars used in the time of Franklin. These were canning-sized jars lined with metal that, it was discovered, could hold or store electricity. Jars are for fluids. The paradigm of "electricity as a fluid" had a lot to do with the original invention and construction of these jars. Modern science students are told that these jars were used by early experimentalists and survive only for their curious historical interest and for "demonstrations." This is true, but this glib explanation conceals why anyone would have made them in the first place because such jars are thought about today only in terms of the modern paradigm for electricity in which the jar is viewed as a "capacitor." This term still carries a remote echo of some kind of fluid measure, as do the terms "leakage" and "saturation." Since modern students know that electrical capacitors do not pass water or any other liquids, the common explanations and construction of Leyden jars leaves students bewildered with an unsatisfied sense of incongruity.
The study of paradigms is what prepares a student for membership in any particular scientific community in which he hopes to practice, in which he will be required to carry on his own practice within an accepted paradigm. Such a shared paradigm is a commitment by an entire profession to certain specific rules and standards of scientific practice with others who share the same view of the world or phenomena they are studying. A paradigm in this sense is more fundamental than scientific axioms, theories, or rules. The latter are all the result of seeing the world or a smaller group of phenomena in a certain (paradigmatic) way - not vice-versa.
It is commonly thought that the history of science proceeds as Sir Francis Bacon thought: as time goes by, dedicated researchers just accumulate more and more data and, upon this ever-growing stockpile, more and more ingenious and rigorous modes of thought are applied, drawing out all implications and synthesizing everything by then known. This is the naive idea that Kuhn has shown to be wrong. According to Kuhn, science progresses by paradigm shifts, not by mere accumulation and analysis of data.
Before a science reaches a certain level of advancement or maturity, any intelligent and literate layman can read the seminal books, such as Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, in which a new theory of evolution was introduced. Yet, laymen find reading the most modern texts on evolutionary theory virtually impossible. They attribute this failure as being due to a lack of special training. This is certainly true, but it misses the real reason, which does not consist merely of a layman lacking the specialized vocabularies of developed or advanced sciences. Nor is it a lack of intelligence or fundamental scientific ability, as some of the perplexed usually think. What is really missing for them is lack of exposure to - and acceptance of - the shared paradigm implicit or tacitly assumed in this rather advanced scientific literature. Einstein’s theory of general relativity is puzzling to many laymen because they do not share Einstein’s view of the world in which space-time can be "curved." What is more, space, to such laymen, is separate and different from time, and is just not the sort of thing that can be "bent." When Einstein was a young man, it was not just laymen, but eminent professional physicists and astronomers who, according to Hyman Levy of the Imperial College of Science in London, stomped in "incoherent rage" during one of Einstein’s earliest lectures on relativity "at the thought of Space-Time."
New paradigms replace old - but not without a fight: as explained below, even fights won’t help. Old customs must die. The fight is to the death! The replacement of one paradigm by another does not usually happen when younger scientists persuade older ones to accept a new and "better" view. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory that the Earth revolves around the sun (and not vice-versa) was not accepted until the Platonist and sun-worshiper cum mathematician Johannes Kepler took the Copernican system - which was still virtually Ptolemaic - and made it recognizably modern. Copernicus’s own theory and writings still strike modern readers as completely medieval - and they are. Then, all of a sudden, Copernicus’s system was accepted. Max Planck, co-discoverer with Einstein of the quantization of energy, said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." For Kremlinology, this means that totalitarian paradigms of Soviet society, exemplified by the "theories" of Stalinist terror sketched above (and described and examined in detail in what follows), will never be superseded and buried by new paradigms until they are interred alongside their chief purveyors - such as the now advanced-in-age Robert Conquest and David Joravksy - no matter what refuting evidence is forthcoming from Soviet archives newly opened since glasnost’.
The transition to a new paradigm is abrupt, when suddenly specialist and layman alike seem to have their vision of the world transformed. After the Copernican revolution, for example, the universe was seen as much vaster, and people began to think that "the wanderers" (the planets) might be like the Earth in some way. In the wake of the acceptance of a new paradigm, a rash of new discoveries suddenly materializes as the new vision of the world seems to shape not only how people see things in it but also how they look for things in it. Within only fifty or sixty years after Copernicus’s death, mountains on the moon were first "noticed," the phases of Venus observed, and an immense number of previously "unnoticed" stars catalogued. The Chinese had observed sunspots (showing the sun changed which the pre-Copernican, Roman Church-endorsed Ptolemaic system denied) and new stars (nova, also impossible in the Ptolemaic universe) centuries before. However, Europeans never observed either until a paradigm shift into the Copernican had occurred. This demonstrates how a paradigm can operate as an invidious form of "reality tunnel."
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
