摘要：This transmutation of a Depression-era plaint1 mirrors a problem of contemporary political communication scholarship. Although, until the 1990s, much of it could be said to have assumed a relatively paradigmatic form, recent developments have called that model into question without clearly substituting a replacement. 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 large-scale 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 proposingthe need for a sharper sensitivity to significant changes in the language, practice, and mediation of citizenship that render some once-settled assumptions at the very least unsteady and perhaps obsolete. Rather than thinking of paradigmatic change as emanating from ideological antagonism, this article’s approach is to observe how changing historical conditions generate grounds for intellectual reassessment.
