Minds in Revolution: Radical Worldview Formation and Dissolution as Paradigmatic Shifts

Abstract

This paper is about the change beneath belief change: the rebuilding of how a person decides what is true. It argues radicalisation is the formation of a personal worldview, a Weltanschauung governing not only what a person believes but how: what counts as evidence, whose word is trusted, how convictions are justified. On this account, ideology is always present. Absorbed whole or assembled from fragments, the worldview is personally built and ideology's apparent absence is its private construction. Deradicalisation that changes belief content while leaving this epistemic architecture intact tends to fail, producing compliance without transformation and leaving the person open to the next totalising framework.

The framework draws on three fields. From philosophy of science it takes Kuhn, to trace how a worldview consolidates and shifts, Lakatos, to explain why it resists revision, and Feyerabend, to identify the conditions under which a closed framework dissolves. Through psychology it sketches the Biographical Salience Map, which holds that radicalisation runs through life domains and personal constructs weighted differently in each person, accounting for multifinality (identical conditions, but different outcomes). Epistemology then links the two, explaining how these knowledge-forming tendencies occur within Kuhn's paradigm sequence. Drawing from autobiographical accounts, the paper argues genuine deradicalisation is a deep ideological self-transformation, a reconstruction of how a person comes to believe, named here transilience: the restoration of the capacity to build one's own worldview on one's own terms, with sharpened evidence scrutiny. It reframes why content-based interventions can backfire and points practice toward conditions for epistemic pluralism rather than supplying ‘corrected beliefs’.