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Talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts has since become commonplace — not only in science, but also in business, social movements and beyond.

He suggested that scientific revolutions are not a matter of incremental advance; they involve "paradigm shifts."

Kuhn posited two kinds of scientific change: incremental developments in the course of what he called "normal science," and scientific revolutions that punctuate these more stable periods.

But what, exactly, is a paradigm shift? Or, for that matter, a paradigm?

Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."

It turns out this question is hard to answer — not because paradigm has an especially technical or obscure definition, but because it has many. In a paper published in 1970, Margaret Masterson presented a careful reading of Kuhn's 1962 book. She identified 21 distinct senses in which Kuhn used the term paradigm.

First, a paradigm could refer to a special kind of achievement

"Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms.' "

But in other parts of the text, paradigms cover more ground. Paradigms can offer general epistemological viewpoints, like the "philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes," or define a broad sweep of reality, as when "Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time."

In the end, Masterson distills Kuhn's 21 senses of paradigm into a more respectable three, and she identifies what she sees as both novel and important aspects of Kuhn's "paradigm view" of science. But for our purposes, Masterson's analysis sheds light on two questions that turn out to be related: what Kuhn meant by paradigm in the first place, and how a single word managed to assume such a broad and expansive set of meanings after being unleashed by Kuhn's book.

a new book, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, which is remarkable for how it connects the high-level concepts to everyday examples of how our brains make predictions, how that process can lead us astray, and what we can do about it.

being driven to stay within your own viability envelope is crucial to the kind of intelligence that we know about—the kind of intelligence that we are

If you ask what is a predictive brain for, the answer has to be: staying alive. Predictive brains are a way of staying within your viability envelope as an embodied biological organism: getting food when you need it, getting water when you need it.

in predictive processing, perception is structured around prediction. Perception is about the brain having a guess at what’s most likely to be out there and then using sensory information to refine the guess.

artificial curiosity. Predictive-processing systems automatically have that. They’re set up so that they predict the conditions of their own survival, and they’re always trying to get rid of prediction errors. But if they’ve solved all their practical problems and they’ve got nothing else to do, then they’ll just explore. Getting rid of any error is going to be a good thing for them. If you’re a creature like that, you’re going to be a really good learning system. You’re going to love to inhabit the environments that you can learn most from, where the problems are not too simple, not too hard, but just right.

It’s an effect that you also see in Marieke Jepma et al.’s work on pain. They showed that if you predict intense pain, the signal that you get will be interpreted as more painful than it would otherwise be, and vice versa. Then they asked why you don’t correct your misimpression. If it’s my expectation that is making it feel more painful, why don’t I get prediction errors that correct it?

The reason is that there are no errors. You’re expecting a certain level of pain, and your prediction helps bring that level about; there is nothing for you to correct. In fact, you’ve got confirmation of your own prediction. So it can be a vicious circle

Do you think this self-fulfilling loop in psychosis and pain perception helps to account for misinformation in our society’s and people’s susceptibility to certain narratives?Absolutely. We all have these vulnerabilities and self-fulfilling cycles. We look at the places that tend to support the models that we already have, because that’s often how we judge whether the information is good or not

Given that we know we’re vulnerable to self-fulfilling information loops, how can we make sure we don’t get locked into a belief?Unfortunately, it’s really difficult. The most potent intervention is to remind ourselves that we sample the world in ways that are guided by the models that we’ve currently got. The structures of science are there to push back against our natural tendency to cherry-pick.