Paradigms: How do you think about your friends?

It seems to me that understanding paradigms is one of the fundamental concepts you need in your mental toolkit if you want to unlock the apparent mysteries of the human mind. A paradigm is just a fancy name for a model. In our sense, a model is a representation for something else. Models come in all shapes and sizes; they can be physical or abstract, simple or complex, logical or intuitive.
When I was young, I used to make models of battleships, aircraft carriers, airplanes and cars. These models were a physical representation of the real thing. You could tell a lot about the real thing by examining its model. You could get an idea what it looked like and it's proportions. If it was a model of a battleship, you could count the number and type of guns, and see how many life boats it had.
However, these models fall short. I tried putting them in water, and they would flip over on their side. They weren't functional models. This illustrates one of the main ideas of models, or paradigms. In their representations, some areas are of concern while other areas are ignored. In the case of my models, it was important to capture the look, but just about nothing else.
Think about crash test dummies. They are models of the human body. They are designed to model the kines