The prevailing pattern of thought in a discipline or part of a discipline. Perhaps the most powerful Western paradigm has been the ‘scientific method’. T. Kuhn (1972) argued that the evolution of a new paradigm marks a new stage in thinking. This paradigm persists until too many anomalies occur, when it is replaced by a new paradigm that is able to explain the anomalies. In geography, for example, the regional geography paradigm was superseded by the quantitative revolution, and then the cultural turn.
R. Inkpen (2005), pp. 18–21 is strongly recommended for paradigms in physical geography; Lomolino (2000) Glob. Ecol. & Biogeog. 9, 1 offers a new paradigm for island biogeography, and, in human geography, DeLyser and Shui (2013) PHG are concerned with the open-science paradigm and the ‘fourth paradigm’.