The limitations of paradigms are counterbalanced by their advantages:
paradigms provide clear conceptual models that facilitate one’s movement
in the world. In acting not only as models of – but also as templates
for – reality, paradigms enable us to behave in organized ways, to take
action that make sense under a given set of principles. ‘To paradigm,’
if you will, is to create the world through the story we tell about it.
We then can live as cultural beings in the organized and coherent
paradigmatic world we have created. We cannot live without paradigms.
But we can learn to be conscious and aware of how they influence our
thoughts and shape our experience, to understand that they open some
possibilities while closing others. That awareness can bring a rare kind
of freedom – the freedom to ‘think beyond.’
Davis-Floyd R, St. John G. “From doctor to healer. The transformative journey.” Rutgers University Press, London, 1998. “… the open-minded person is one who is able and willing to form an opinion, or revise it, in the light of evidence and argument.” William Hare
Sellman D. Open-mindedness: a virtue for professional practice. Nurs Philos 2003; 4(1): 17-24.
“persons who exhibited ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ were disinclined to think in terms of probability, tended to favor stereotypes and showed a marked discomfort with ambiguity by escaping into whatever seemed concrete. … intolerance for ambiguity (has been defined) as ‘the tendency to perceive situations that are novel, complex or insoluble, as sources of threat.’ Moreover, intolerance of ambiguity has been associated with a constellation of other personality traits including rigidity, authoritarianism, dogmatism and ethnocentrism, with socially relevant phenomena such as religiosity and conventionality, and with the inability to adapt to cognitive stimuli that are at variance with conventional reality.”
Geller G. et al. Measuring physicians' tolerance for ambiguity and its relationship to their reported practices regarding genetic testing. Med Care 1993; 31(11): 989-1001.
See also: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/02/managing-uncertainty-re-creating.html
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