CAT 2007 — VARC Question 7
The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
To discover the relation between rules, paradigms, and normal science, consider first how the historian isolates the particular loci of commitment that have been described as accepted rules. Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications. These are the community's paradigms, revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises. By studying them and by practicing with them, the members of the corresponding community learn their trade. The historian, of course, will discover in addition a penumbral area occupied by achievements whose status is still in doubt, but the core of solved problems and techniques will usually be clear. Despite occasional ambiguities, the paradigms of a mature scientific community can be determined with relative ease.
That demands a second step and one of a somewhat different kind. When undertaking it, the historian must compare the community's paradigms with each other and with its current research reports. In doing so, his object is to discover what isolable elements, explicit or implicit, the members of that community may have abstracted from their more global paradigms and deploy it as rules in their research. Anyone who has attempted to describe or analyze the evolution of a particular scientific tradition will necessarily have sought accepted principles and rules of this sort. Almost certainly, he will have met with at least partial success. But, if his experience has been at all like my own, he will have found the search for rules both more difficult and less satisfying than the search for paradigms. Some of the generalizations he employs to describe the community's shared beliefs will present more problems. Others, however, will seem a shade too strong. Phrased in just that way, or in any other way he can imagine, they would almost certainly have been rejected by some members of the group he studies. Nevertheless, if the coherence of the research tradition is to be understood in terms of rules, some specification of common ground in the corresponding area is needed. As a result, the search for a body of rules competent to constitute a given normal research tradition becomes a source of continual and deep frustration.
Recognizing that frustration, however, makes it possible to diagnose its source. Scientists can agree that a Newton, Lavoisier, Maxwell, or Einstein has produced an apparently permanent solution to a group of outstanding problems and still disagree, sometimes without being aware of it, about the particular abstract characteristics that make those solutions permanent. They can, that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it. Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding research. Normal science can be determined in part by the direct inspection of paradigms, a process that is often aided by but does not depend upon the formulation of rules and assumption. Indeed, the existence of a paradigm need not even imply that any full set of rules exists.
Each of the following questions has a paragraph from which the last sentence has been deleted. From the given options, choose the one that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.
Characters are also part of deep structure. Characters tie events in a story together and provide a thread of continuity and meaning. Stories can be about individuals, groups, projects or whole organizations, so from an organizational studies perspective, the focal actor(s) determine the level and unit of analysis used in a study. Stories of mergers and acquisitions, for example, are common place. In these stories whole organizations are personified as actors. But these macro-level stories usually are not told from the perspective of the macro-level participants, because whole organizations cannot narrate their experiences in the first person.
Answer & solution
- A
More generally, data concerning the identities and relationships of the characters in the story are required, if one is to understand role structure and social networks in which that process is embedded.
- B
Personification of a whole organization abstracts away from the particular actors and from traditional notions of level of analysis.
- C
The personification of a whole organization is important because stories differ depending on who is enacting various events.
- D
Every story is told from a particular point of view, with a particular narrative voice, which is not regarded as part of the deep structure.
The personification of a whole organization is a textual device we use to make macro-level theories more comprehensible.
The paragraph briefly is about why stories are structured around focal characters. And why in stories of organizations, organizations have to be personified and focal characters as organizations cannot narrate their experiences. Option 5 concludes this chain of thoughts by saying that this kind of personification is a textual device resorted to bring coherence.
Option 1 is incorrect as it continues the first part of the paragraph and is unrelated the second part.
Option 2 is incorrect as it talks about abstracting away from the particular whereas the paragraph is talking about particularizing.
Options 3 and 4 talk about different points of view, which is irrelevant to the paragraph.
Hence, the correct answer is option 5.