Werner Erhard
The paradigmatic breakthroughs are the notions of linguistic relativity for Benjamin Lee Whorf, conditioning for Erving Goffman, temporocentrism and paradigm shift for Thomas Kuhn, enlightenment for John Enright, and record and context for Werner Erhard.
The principle of linguistic relativity emerged for anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf in his earlier years as a fire investigator. He noticed that the way people described situations determined how they would orient towards them. Describing a drum as “empty” when it had explosive vapors in it and throwing a match into the “empty” drum, which then exploded, showed that people oriented towards a situation as they described it and not as it was. He then applied that principle to people and the world generally.
Although Erving Goffman may never have used the word “conditioning,” still what he stumbled upon was that people oriented towards the world out of their own conditioning rather than to the way the world actually was.
Thomas Kuhn saw that every generation of scientists oriented towards science as if their own generation was at the pinnacle of it (temperocentrism) even though their own science was regularly superseded by the next generation’s paradigmatic breakthroughs. What they were unaware of was the process of dissonance and paradigm shift that made one generation’s science obsolete and carried science itself forward.
John Enright studied the Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls and could not understand Perls’ secret until he realized that his secret was enlightenment. John himself became enlightened and found his own understanding of people’s behavior took off from there.
And Werner Erhard penetrated human behavior to the point where he saw that the mind operated according to multidimensional records of now which had the characteristics he went on to describe. He too became enlightened and saw the difference between the mind’s content and the being’s context.