The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. The paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses. A lot of us live our professional lives in the paradigmatic mode: making PowerPoint presentations, writing legal briefs, issuing orders, or even, in my case, cobbling together opinion columns. Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and
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