摘要：The MIT historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn famously introduced the notions of paradigm, paradigm shift, and revolutionary science in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970/1962), focusing primarily on the early histories of chemistry and astronomy. Those ideas and the parallel notion of puzzle-solving normal science have become frequently and influentially used in both the social sciences and humanistic scholarship, including the interdisciplinary field of communication research (Bennett & Iyengar, 2010; Dervin et al., 1989; Katz, 1992; Gitlin, 1978; Rosengren, 1985; Wang, 2011). What follows is a continuation and extension of a special section of The International Journal of Communication on the topic, “Communication Research as a Discipline.” Reflecting on the future of the field, the present special section joins contributions from a collection of key European scholars around a focus on three interrelated questions: 1. Is it useful and appropriate to characterize the diverse practices of communication research as reflecting an underlying paradigm or paradigms which represent the common concerns of a community of scholars? 2. To the extent that the notion of paradigms is a legacy of past communication research, is this legacy subject to pressures to change as a result of the significant transformations in the media technologies of the digital age? 3. Similarly, are past paradigms subject to pressures to change as a result of new historical conditions, public practices of communication, and normative concerns?
