The Prime Minister's paradigm

"There would be no paradigm shift in the economic policies. We are consistent and rather will be improving the economic policies," said Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani in the World Economic Forum on May 18, 2008.
What did the Prime Minister mean by "no paradigm shift," or more fundamentally, what does a "paradigm" really mean in the economic policies? Since the word "paradigm" is used by many people so frequently, it might be a good time to reflect on how it has gained currency.
Professor Thomas S. Kuhn, a physics professor of the University of California, Berkeley, published a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in 1962. Professor Kuhn explains that "paradigms" relate closely to "normal science", by which he meant "research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice." But Professor Kuhn segregated one group of scientific achievements from the rest on the basis of two essential characteristics common in the first group.
One, these scientific achievements were sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Two, each scientific achievement was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. Professor Kuhn referred to these scientific achievements that share these two essential characteristics as "paradigms".
"In a science, explains Professor Kuhn, "a paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions". He further elaborates:
Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognise as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number.
The success of a paradigm, whether Aristotle's analysis of motion, Ptolemy's computations of planetary position, Lavoisier's application of the balance, or Maxwell's mathematization of the electromagnetic field, is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualisation of that promise, an actualisation achieved by extending the knowledge between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.
In a nutshell, a paradigm is what the members of a particular scientific community, and "they alone, share" according to Professor Kuhn, and he himself admits that there is an intrinsic circularity in logic here because that particular scientific community consists of those scientists who share a paradigm! That is why it is very difficult to introduce a new paradigm.
Nonetheless, the term, "paradigm," has entered into the non-scientific literature since the publication of Kuhn's book as his idea was itself revolutionary in its time and became part of a "paradigm shift" in the social science literature.
Against this background, let us examine whether the Prime Minister's use of the term in that particular context was appropriate or not. First of all, let me introduce Professor Kuhn's Postscript dated 1969 that he included to the Second, enlarged edition of the book published in 1970, in which he unequivocally states, "A paradigm governs, in the first instance, not a subject matter but rather a group of practitioners. Any study of paradigm-directed or of paradigm-shattering research must begin by locating the responsible group or groups."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as "a pattern or model, an exemplar." Surely, I doubt that the Prime Minister was referring to Pakistan's economic policies as a model that should be emulated elsewhere. I also doubt that the Prime Minister was saying that there was nothing revolutionary about the economic policies of Pakistan when he mentioned "no paradigm shift." I suspect he was a little bit carried away in the choice of the word and phrase, which are overused and have become trite.
It was unfortunate because he could have used the term perfectly well when he suggested the termination of the special administrative status of the tribal areas located in the North-West Frontier Province. These tribal areas are subject to the federal administration, but normal Pakistani laws, courts, and police have no jurisdiction.
As I mentioned earlier in this column ("Policy reform and political processes," April 16, 2008), the Prime Minister wants to put an end to what he called "a colonial hangover" by incorporating the tribal areas into the rest of the country, so that full rights and protections under law could be provided for all the citizens of Pakistan. That would be aptly described as a "paradigm shift."
Kuhn draws parallelism between a change of paradigm called a revolution between political and scientific development. Political revolutions are triggered by "a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created."
He goes on to say that the parallel has "a second and more profound aspects upon which the significance of the first depends." Political revolutions seek to change political institutions by means that those political institutions themselves prohibit.
As the initiators of change suspend or abolish some features of political institutions, the malfunctioning of political institutions engender crisis, which alone "attenuates the role of political institutions."
As the crisis deepens, some individuals emerge committing themselves to "some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework." The Charter of Democracy is such an effort, and so is the Prime Minister's proposal to end the special administrative status of the tribal areas. In these areas, there was indeed a paradigm shift. And any appraisal of such proposal must begin by first locating who are responsible for it since a paradigm governs not a subject matter, but a group of practitioners.