"T. S. Kuhn's notion of a paradigm has replaced the positivist account of theories in many discussions, particularly in the social sciences. Most generally, a paradigm is a conceptual scheme representing a group's shared commitments and providing them with a way of looking at phenomena (Kuhn, 1970b). This notion is flexible enough to have much practical and historical applicability, but it is too vague to help with philosophical problems about explanation, justification, and meaning. Despite a professed desire to avoid total subjectivity, Kuhn has not succeeded in describing how paradigms can be rationally evaluated, or how different paradigms can relate to the same world, or even what it is for a paradigm to be used in solving a problem."