Paradigms

In The Crucible of Doubt (Terryl and Fiona Givens), paradigms are the inherited worldviews that both guide and silently constrain inquiry. The book’s formulation: “We all inhabit geographical, linguistic, and social worlds that shape our vision and our impressions of what is normal, what is real. Our worldview is a collective set of assumptions we carry with us that condition every question we ask. These ‘paradigms’ make it possible to guide inquiry, but they can also limit and impede our inquiry… all too often, we don’t realize the limiting assumptions with which we are working.” The trap is that the assumptions are invisible from the inside — “only when we have left a misguided assumption behind are we able to see it clearly,” and “it is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.”

The Givenses extend this to religious thought specifically: great Christian thinkers operated with assumptions, sanctioned by tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and scripture, that made certain answers difficult or impossible — delaying prayerful responses to earnest questions, sometimes by decades. The concept pairs in the book with the Spirit of Humility (the willingness to leave misguided assumptions behind and ask the “genuine question”) and overlaps with Heuristics, which currently captures the same idea of inherited assumptions that guide but also limit.

Context: “Paradigm” in this sense traces to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — a shared framework of assumptions through which a community interprets evidence, and which becomes visible as limiting only after it is replaced.

Where this appears

• The Crucible of Doubt — the Givenses’ opening framing of inherited worldviews as intellectual straitjackets that condition (and limit) every question we ask.