Paradigm shifts versus fashion shifts?

Reconstruction of paradigm shifts

There are many extensions of the basic attribute grammar formalism intended to improve its pragmatics, e.g. certain modularity concepts, remote access, object-orientation, templates, rule models and higher-order features. In the paper, a generic and formal approach to an effective and orthogonal reconstruction of the concepts underlying some extensions is described. The reconstruction is effect...

Paradigm Shifts in Coordination Theory

Coordination – commonly defined as the achievement of concerted action has been a phenomenon of central concern to organizational theorizing since the 1920s. Until the 1980s, information processing and contingency theorists have shaped coordination theory around the relationship between coordination mechanisms and drivers like task dependence, uncertainty, and equivocality. Recently, conceptual...

Provisional Beliefs and Paradigm Shifts

Bayesian inference has the advantage of dynamic consistency, but the drawback of rigidity. When a decision-maker’s initial model fails a hypothesis test, he may wish to form a new model, violating Bayes’ rule. We show that if such “paradigm shifts” are rare, he will be “approximately” dynamically consistent. More specifically, we show that in our setting dynamic consistency is equivalent to the...

Simple Forecasts and Paradigm Shifts

We study the implications of learning in an environment where the true model of the world is a multivariate one, but where agents update only over the class of simple univariate models. If a particular simple model does a poor job of forecasting over a period of time, it is eventually discarded in favor of an alternative—yet equally simple—model that would have done better over the same period....

Paradigm Shifts and Tapeworm Systematics