It is out of the question that any of these causes must have played a role in many paradigm shifts along human history. The bottom line of all these models though is that major changes demand major causes. In others, those changes are endogenous-like the appearance of innovative breakthroughs. Some of these models stress the importance of externally forced, fast environmental or cognitive changes. There has been a long debate in the literature about the origins of cultural paradigm shifts, and different models, resorting to different causes, have been proposed. The first two points bring the topic of cultural paradigm shifts into the domain of cultural evolution the third one aligns with recent work emphasizing the importance of cultural elements as enhancers or inhibitors of other cultural elements the last point resembles the concept of punctuated equilibrium in biology (not unbeknown to cultural evolution ), or of critical phenomena in physics-where small changes in external parameters induce abrupt changes of measurable magnitudes.
compared to the lifetime of each paradigm)-for instance, the prehistoric archaeological record reveals long periods where tools hardly change, which are ‘suddenly’ replaced by completely different toolkits, full of new, more efficient, even more diverse tools. And fourth, the paradigm shift is an abrupt phenomenon in historical time scale (i.e. Third, the presence of some cultural elements affects the relative importance of other cultural elements in the individuals’ cultural state. Second, they can be thought of as an evolutionary phenomenon-there is a change in the cultural paradigm in response to a change of the ‘environment’ (understood in a broad sense). First, Crosby’s essay suggests that paradigm shifts are not limited to the dynamics of science, but can be found in more general cultural settings (arts, fashion, cooking, laws, philosophy, etc.). Kuhn, who coined the term ‘paradigm shift’, proposed a similar mechanism to explain scientific revolutions.
In the cultural paradigm shift that took place in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, culture drastically changed in the turn of a few generations. But, actually, it was the acquisition of quantitative habits in marginal aspects of culture (accurate time measure in music, geometric description in painting, bookkeeping in business management, etc.) that eventually drove the change. By 1250, new external pressures (such as the rise of the European population, the migration of peasants to cities, the flourishing of commerce with new, distant markets) started to question the qualitative model. Their qualitative way of thinking provided a coherent and sufficient model of the world, even if dates were not very precise or the day was divided in twelve hours from dawn till sunset, regardless of whether it was winter or summer. Crosby explains that in the Middle Ages Europeans did not pay much attention to time.
In his book The Measure of Reality, historian Alfred W. However, quantitative societies are relatively recent happenings. We are so deeply used to measuring everything in and around us that it is difficult to imagine it may have been otherwise. Our model puts the phenomenon of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution in the same category as catastrophic shifts in ecology or phase transitions in physics, where minute causes lead to major collective changes. A relevant consequence of this dynamics is the irreversible nature of paradigm shifts: the old paradigm cannot be restored even if the external changes are undone. Our main result is that abrupt paradigm shifts occur, in response to weak changes in the landscape, only in the presence of epistasis between cultural traits, and regardless of whether horizontal transmission is biased by homophily. Cultural traits reinforce or hinder each other (through a form of cultural epistasis) to prevent cognitive dissonance. We implement this idea through a population dynamics model in which individuals are defined by a vector of cultural traits that changes mainly through cultural contagion, biased by a ‘cultural fitness’ landscape, between contemporary individuals. While current models of cultural shifts usually require a major exogenous or endogenous change, we propose that the mechanism underlying many paradigm shifts may just be an emergent feature of the inherent congruence among different cultural traits.
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes.