ABSTRACT
Thought paradigms - Thomas Kuhn calls them simply 'paradigms' - are conglomerations of exemplary thoughts. They include various fairy tales about what the 'real world' might be like all bound up in cover stories about how it may be known. They consist of thoughts wrapped up in thoughts about thoughts. One phenomenological technique which has been suggested to avoid this undignified end is that we resist the bait, yet at the same time keep the problem in mind, through trick of bracketing. Nowadays when two laymen enter into a dispute about matters of fact, or about acceptable explanations of mutually agreed facts, they often have no reasonable means of resolving their argument without recourse to opinions of some expert. Any blancmange mixture that goes into them is destined to come out shaped like rabbit or tortoise, depending on the mould. Without the paradigm the thoughts cannot take shape, while the shape that they will take is predetermined by the paradigm.
