In the philosophy of science the notion is associated with Kuhn's influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn suggests that certain scientific works, such as Newton's Principia or John Dalton's New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), provide an open-ended resource: a framework of concepts, results, and procedures within which subsequent work is structured. Normal science proceeds within such a framework or paradigm. A paradigm does not impose a rigid or mechanical approach, but can be taken more or less creatively and flexibly. The concept was influential in supplanting the positivist conception of science as an abstract, rationally and logically structured set of propositions. Kuhn's view emphasizes its concrete historical situation in the space of problems and approaches inherited from preceding achievements. A paradigm is only upset in periods of revolutionary science, typically arising in response to an accumulation of anomalies and stresses that cannot be resolved within its framework.
Philosophy dictionary. Academic. 2011.