I am sorry, James, I used the words paradigm and theory casually.  But I don’t think the piece I wrote above is scientific!  It’s psychology, on which I am not versed.  I don’t actually know the scientific meaning of the word paradigm, but I do know the scientific meaning of the word theory, and my paragraphs are not theories, just ideas.
here is Dilbert on paradigms:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/asplos98/dilbert.html
