The three levels of “paradigms” held applicable to all knowledge communities by Thomas Kuhn are discussed, and the fourth—exemplars—deemed by Kuhn to be applicable only to natural scientific communities, is found to be of heuristic value in comprehending the paradigmatic communal life of sociologists as well. This is illustrated through the presentation of an exemplar rooted in a dialectical epistemology conditioned by a “prophetic” self-image consciously in dialogue with one's existential commitments and offered as a likely archetype of one of the paradigmatic modes which social research is apt to take in the 1970s.