摘要 : With hindsight, the 1970 second edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had more influence in the social sciences than in the natural sciences to which it was directed. His notion of 'paradigm' is quot... 展开 With hindsight, the 1970 second edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had more influence in the social sciences than in the natural sciences to which it was directed. His notion of 'paradigm' is quoted frequently in the social sciences. Yet there are two Kuhns - the benign and the baleful. He is one of those seminal thinkers who is often misunderstood despite his clarity of writing - principally, I suspect, because many of those who use the notion of paradigm may not have read Kuhn, let alone had a 'second look'. For many, the notion of paradigm is associated with - is even an excuse for - relativism in both epistemology and ontology. Of course, Kuhn and more contemporary sources of relativism - the likes of postmodernism and post-structuralism - are worlds apart by intellectual origin. Yet a certain tendency within academe is so concerned to reject a straw-man version of positivism, and to over-privilege ethnographic knowledge of how individuals and cultures 'understand', that relativism from whatever source ends up ruling. 收起