100 4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon?
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CommunityGroup:
scientists working together andor conferring with one another, either in person or through the medium of disciplinary literature. While a group is
obviously composed of individuals, if it is functioning as a group, then the individuals will, to varying degrees, share beliefs and behavior patterns.
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Group Commitment:
conscious or subconscious obligations andor allegiance to a particular manner of scientific methodology and perspective; often generated by a
particular metatheory. Kuhn writes of the commitments not simply as a body, but as an organized group, a “constellation.”
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Metatheory:
ideology or theoretical presuppositions; underlying beliefs which generate a particular approach; generally extend from first principles established in
early stages of the paradigmatic life cycle
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Disciplinary Matrix:
the objects of group commitment. Kuhn lists these as: 1 symbolic generalizations, 2 models, 3 values, 4 exemplars. The basic term
theory in some senses captures these, as well as the related notion of methodology. While Kuhn chose to abandon the term ‘disciplinary matrix’ post-1970, it will be
retained here since it is a useful term. Theory, alone, does not capture the individual components, nor is it adequately identified, in its common usage, as an object of
commitment.
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Shared Examples:
in particular, this refers to concrete problems and their solutions which a discipline employs as models or patterns for organizing investigation, as well
as in teaching presuppositions and perspective. Shared examples can include con- ceptual models and exemplars two of the elements of the disciplinary matrix.
The following discussion addresses these terms more fully, both in regard to how Kuhn used them and, later, in regard to the code model of communication and linguistics.
4.1.3. Paradigm communities
Kuhn broadly defines paradigms in terms of a group’s conceptual commitments, offering the heading “Paradigms as the Constellation of Group Commitments”
1996 :175, 181. Because paradigms involve metatheory, they command orthodox ways
of viewing the subject of inquiry and canonical approaches to its study. They comprise the disciplinary worldview of the scientific community in question. Stated as such, a
definition of such a community can be potentially circular, but not necessarily so. Kuhn suggests that “Scientific communities can and should be isolated without prior recourse
to paradigms; the latter can then be discovered by scrutinizing the behavior of a given community’s members”
Kuhn 1996 :176. For example, groups and subgroups tend to
define themselves through academic associations and conference attendance. A group can thereby be identified according to its own terms. Kuhn continues:
Both normal science and revolutions are … community-based activities. To discover and analyze them, one must first unravel the changing community structure of the sciences over
time. A paradigm governs, in the first instance, not a subject matter but rather a group of
4. Code Model Linguistics: Patch or Abandon? 101
practitioners. Any study of paradigm-directed or of paradigm-shattering research must begin
by locating the responsible group or groups. Kuhn 1996
:179, 180; italics added
Here Kuhn uses the term ‘paradigm’ in the sense of ‘commitment’ and ‘metatheory’. He is arguing that, if one desires to study anthropologists, for example, and one finds a
group of anthropologists identifying themselves as neo-functionalists, then one may reasonably hypothesize that the members of this self-defined group share a paradigm.
Kuhn also acknowledges that a group may not call themselves anything. Such anonymity does not negate the existence of group commitments. It may simply indicate
that the said group represents the unmarked case. While identification of such com- mitments may be more difficult than for those of a named group, an analyst may still
discover shared behavior.
4.1.4. Disciplinary matrix
