Words

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted and I had promised to put up some thoughts on worldviews. Well here’s a start!

Among thinkers across the disciplines there is not a consensus on what elements make up a worldview. From Dilthey’s mental categories shaped by autonomous human reason, to Nietzsche’s subjective creation of socially contextualized human knowers, to Wittgenstein’s useful language describing what we do, and to Foucault’s linguistic power suit, we see that over the past 200 years scholars have described worldviews differently (Sire 2004, 24-31). Most modern thinkers saw worldviews as made up mainly of pretheoretical and presuppositional elements relating to an objective reality, while postmodern thinkers saw worldviews (if there is such a thing from their perspective) as theoretical constructs of the mind that did not relate to any absolute reality.

The difference comes from beginning with various starting points: ontology, epistemology, or hermeneutics. Despite this lack of consensus, there is agreement amongst some Christian worldview thinkers that the proper foundation for a worldview is ontological, namely the revelation by God of himself. I think Sire gives a well rounded definition in his work, “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” (Sire, Naming The Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, 122).

What do you think?