The core concept from Kuhn: the frameworks of assumptions, methods, and standards within which normal science operates. Scientific Paradigms define what questions are worth asking, what methods are appropriate, what counts as evidence, what constitutes a solution. They're the invisible structures that make normal science possible—and that make revolutionary science so traumatic. Understanding Scientific Paradigms is essential for understanding how science actually works, not how it's idealized.
Example: "He'd thought science just accumulated facts. Scientific Paradigms showed him otherwise: facts were always facts-within-a-paradigm. When paradigms shifted, facts shifted too. Science wasn't a straight line; it was a series of revolutions."
by Abzugal March 9, 2026
Get the Scientific Paradigms mug.The frameworks of assumptions, concepts, and processes that shape how individuals and groups think, perceive, and understand. Cognitive Paradigms include mental models, conceptual schemes, cognitive styles, and ways of knowing—all the structures that shape how we make sense of the world. They're what cognitive science studies when it examines how minds work, but with the added recognition that these structures are not universal but vary across individuals, cultures, and contexts.
Example: "She thought everyone thought like her. Cognitive Paradigms showed her otherwise: different minds, different paradigms. Her way of thinking wasn't the way; it was a way."
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The frameworks of assumptions, values, and practices that shape how societies organize themselves, how people relate to each other, how social reality is constructed. Social Paradigms include norms, institutions, power relations, and cultural categories—all the invisible structures that make social life possible. They're what we mean when we talk about "the way things are done"—which is always just one way among many, made to seem natural by its familiarity.
Example: "He thought his society's way of organizing gender was just natural. Social Paradigms showed him otherwise: it was one paradigm among many, constructed not given, contingent not necessary. Other societies did it differently; his could too."
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Get the Social Paradigms mug.Scientific paradigms understood as a form of ivory culture—the shared frameworks, assumptions, methods, and exemplars that define normal science within a community, but viewed through the lens of academic power rather than pure epistemology. Ivory paradigms are not just ways of seeing but ways of controlling—they determine who counts as a legitimate investigator, what questions are worth asking, which methods are acceptable, and how results will be interpreted. To work within an ivory paradigm is to be protected, funded, published, and celebrated. To work outside it is to be ignored, dismissed, or actively suppressed. The paradigm is ivory because it's not just a cognitive framework but a social institution, not just a way of knowing but a way of excluding.
Example: "His research was solid, but it didn't fit the reigning paradigm—so it was ignored, unfunded, unpublished. Ivory Paradigms: not just ways of seeing, but walls that keep certain things from being seen at all."
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Get the Ivory Paradigms mug.Parasitic: Blinded, and invasive to an environment can either grow or sustain an ecosystem or cause havoc.
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