How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Seite 417

4.30 PARADIGMS
Businessdictionary.com defines paradigm as: Intellectual perception or
view, accepted by an individual or a society as a clear example, model, or
pattern of how things work in the world.
Their definition of paradigm shift is: A fundamental change in an
individual's or a society's view of how things work in the world. For
example, the shift from earth to sun as the center of solar system,
'humors' to microbes as causes of disease, heart to brain as the seat
of thinking and feeling.
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Webster Dictionary describes a paradigm as "an example or pattern:
small, self-contained, simplified examples that we use to illustrate
procedures, processes, and theoretical points."
The most quoted definition of paradigm is Thomas Kuhn's (1962, 1970),
i.e. paradigm as the underlying assumptions and intellectual structure
upon which research and development in a field of inquiry is based. The
other definitions in the research literature include:
1.

2.

Patton (1990): A paradigm is a world view, a general
perspective, a way of breaking down the complexity of the real
world.
Paradigm is an interpretative framework, which is guided by "a
set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be
understood and studied." (Guba, 1990). Denzin and Lincoln
(2001) listed three categories of those beliefs:
 Ontology: what kind of being is the human being. Ontology
deals with the question of what is real.
 Epistemology: what is the relationship between the inquirer
and the known: "epistemology is the branch of philosophy
that studies the nature of knowledge and the process by
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