Paradigms of Civic Communication

Abstract

Before wrestling with this issue, however, perhaps we should consider what might be meant by a paradigm. T. S. Kuhn (1962), the most noted expounder of the concept, referred to it in broad and largescale terms. For him, a paradigm comprised a set of scientific achievements that, for a time, provided model problems and solutions for a scientific community of researchers. It would be marked by comprehensiveness, coherence, and communal interconnectedness (i.e., across participating scholars). In our own communications field, the liberal versus neo-Marxist ideological opposites and the administrative versus critical theory approaches to research would seem to have most closely approximated Kuhn’s definition of paradigms. However, Kuhn would not have accepted the validity of the theme that was set by Brenda Dervin for the 1985 conference of the International Communication Association, namely, “Paradigm Dialogues,” since, in his view, rival paradigms were “incommensurable.” In what follows, we are less interested in identifying or intensifying paradigmatic incommensurability than we are in proposing

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