This document discusses four paradigms of knowledge: empiricism, interpretative theory, critical theory, and postmodernism. It then covers structural functionalism as a paradigm that views society as a whole structure where all parts are interrelated and dysfunctional parts lead to disequilibrium and change. Structural functionalism was advocated by Émile Durkheim and views social facts as external influences that can only be understood through empirical induction. However, structural functionalism has been criticized as being tautological, deterministic, and lacking historical/cultural context. Later theorists attempted to address these criticisms by combining functionalism with falsification and using grounded theory to generate theories from qualitative data.