Theoretical and Applied Economics (Dec 2015)
The Role of Epistemological Paradigms in Research in Social Sciences and Humanities
Abstract
Currently used in science, the term “paradigm” gives rise to a series of very important philosophical, ontological, epistemological and historical inquiries, which are nevertheless a source of confusion for the researchers sometimes, when they should actually be a point of reference in the realization and validation of the scientific works. Indeed, the term paradigm is a polysemantic term, its senses including in Universal Illustrated Dictionary of the Romanian Language (Dictionarul universal ilustrat al limbii romane) (2010) the individualized meaning of the syntagm “scientific paradigm”: “set of concepts, results, methods, procedures, usually instituted by certain scientific works, according to which research takes place in a certain scientific community and during a certain historical epoch”. Our paper aims to clarify this term, focusing on the essential components situating it among the fields of analysis of epistemology. We do not aim to approach all the semantic ambiguities included in the definition of the scientific paradigm, because these are actually a sign that the evolution of the epistemology of a science is a perfectible process, and, along history, the development of science has been faced with a genuine competition between the old and the new paradigms.
