The concept of a paradigm was propounded by Thomas Kuhn, an American physicist turned historian and philosopher of science, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962.

By a paradigm Kuhn meant the whole framework of shared assumptions, theories, methods and standards within which a scientific community works at a given time. It settles what counts as a legitimate problem, what counts as an acceptable solution, and what may be taken for granted without argument.

His central claim was that science does not advance by the steady accumulation of facts. Instead it alternates between two states. In periods of normal science, researchers work inside the reigning paradigm, solving puzzles that the paradigm defines. Over time, observations accumulate that the paradigm cannot accommodate; these anomalies eventually produce a crisis, and the crisis is resolved by a scientific revolution in which a new paradigm replaces the old. The move from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics is Kuhn's most cited example. He argued that competing paradigms are incommensurable, so the choice between them is not settled by evidence alone.

The phrase paradigm shift entered general usage from this work, and in research methodology the term now names the broad philosophical positions - positivist, interpretative, critical - within which enquiry is conducted.

The other three names belong to geography. Peter Haggett is known for locational analysis and the quantitative revolution in the discipline, Von Thunen for the nineteenth century model of agricultural land use, and John K. Wright for geosophy, the study of geographical knowledge. None of them originated the concept of paradigm.

Hence the concept of paradigm was propounded by Thomas Kuhn.