The current perspective of this website on worldviews are as follows:
Worldviews are mental constructs that are part of human cognition. They are used by humans to interpret their surrounding reality. They are built up by sets of assumptions and values. No world view is entirely accurate – every worldview have things it will interpret incorrectly. Different worldviews can be more or less accurate.
Worldviews are personal. A single person can hold multiple different worldviews. Worldviews change over time. A worldview can grow more refined over time, becoming better at correctly interpreting the surrounding environment, and it can grow less refined over time, become worse at interpreting the surrounding environment. A worldview's accuracy can grow or decrease over time.
When someone meets a worldview that greatly differs from theirs, if they do not understand the underlying assumptions of that worldview not only will they be unable to comprehend it, but they will be unable to intepret it correctly. It will seem like insanity, greviously wrong or nonsensical. The conclusions the person who hold that worldview will seem like nonsense. However, if interaction is prolonged the person have an opportunity to understand the incomprehensible worldview. Once that happen they have several options. They can replace a worldview they have with the new worldview, adapt both worldviews and use them in different contexts, applying whichever is most useful to intepret the current situation, or adapt their old worldviews with the new knowledge, allowing those worldviews to understand the thing that previously seemed incomprehensible. Their last option is to reject the opposing worldview, this time not due to an inability to comprehend it, but due to a judgement called based on the gained insight into it.
Claim: It is trough the interaction between opposing worldviews that worldviews can be recalibrated, refined and thus maintain accuracy. That is, these kinds of meetings are vital because they help people recalibrate inaccurate worldviews by understanding misconceptions they have about other worldviews. As worldviews naturally drift over time, having your worldview occasionally challenged helps maintain its accuracy.
Worldviews can also grow dysfunctional. This happens when it not only becomes innaccurate, but it develops assumptions that makes recalibration difficult trough a too high rejection of opposing worldviews.
Worldviews can also be individual, shared, or predominant.
An individual worldview is one that is held by single individuals, where even if two individuals share it they would not consider themselves part of a particular group. A personal outlook or a personal philosophy is an individual worldview.
A shared worldview is a worldview that is held by multiple people. It’s taught and spread as a means to understand and analyse reality. People holding the same worldview would consider themselves to have something in common. An ideology, a framework for analysis, or a philosophy would be examples of shared worldviews.
A predominant worldview is a worldview that is dominant within a given society. A large amount of members of that society knows of this world view or ascribe to it, and it is used by the society to understand itself and the world around itself. A religion, culture, or national or international ideology would be examples of predominant worldviews.
A dysfunctional predominant worldview means that a large scale worldview has become dysfunctional. Such a worldview quickly breeds rejection, as there will always be people who recognize its inaccuracies and inevitable challenges it. As it seeks to supress those challenges it becomes stuck in a feedback spiral where it will inevitable be forced to take greater and greater measures in order to stop itself from having to recalibrate to a less dysfunctional state. The more such measures it takes, the more inaccurate it grows. The more inaccurate it grows, the more it has to escalate the means of maintaining itself. Reforming a dysfunctional predominant worldview after it has become predominant may or may not be impossible. Even it is impossible since it is predominant people will still have to live with it. Therefore an exploration of how large scale worldviews function when they have become dysfunctional may still be worthwhile.
This is an attempt at making a useful distinction between a definition of something and a concept of something.
Definition and concept are here merely used within the context of knowledge representation. The terms may have other meanings outside of this context.
Within this context a definition is a short, formal understanding of an entity, describing what that entity is in one or a few paragraphs.
Definitions are specific and functions as an easy checkbox if an entity is or isn’t something. It is advantageous in that it distinctly and quickly determines if an entity is something.
However the draw back of a definition is that it only provides a limited description of the entity it wishes to describe. That is as a form of knowledge representation, definitions captures a quick, ‘mostly correct’ representation of an entity. If the entity is a picture, the definition would be a short descriptive name of that picture. Therefore definitions are prone to inaccuracy, exceptions, and a lack of in depth information.
Therefore it would be useful to have another term for representing in depth knowledge.
‘Concept’ would be a good term for this.
In the context of knowledge representation, a concept would be a set of properties that describes an entity. The more of these properties an entity has, the more that entity could be said to be what the concept describes.
Therefore unlike a definition, where an entity either fulfils the definition or it doesn’t, an entity does not need to completely fulfil an concept to be considered a part of that concept. Example: A toy car is somewhat like a car, even if it is an imitation. It fulfills part of the concept ‘car’. Another example: An odd model of a car may have only three wheels. It is an odd car, but still fulfils enough of the concept ‘car’ to be considered as such, and it isn’t an imitation.
The properties which composes a concept would only be partially absolute, that is you could have multiple instances of the same concept, with each set of properties in each of those instances all describing the same entity with only some of them being common to all sets.
Unlike a definition, where a single definition is expected to be mutually shared by multiple people, with a concept each person has their own concept, having a different number of properties within that concept, only sharing some of those properties.
The more properties an individual’s concept of something has, and the more accurately those properties describe the entity the concept wishes to describe the deeper understanding of that entity that person could be said to have. The properties that individual shares with another person would represent their common understanding of the entity that concept attempts to describe, depending on how closely the common properties match each other.
The properties could also be weighted, with some properties being considered more important in describing the entity than others. This would help distinguish between a ‘true’ representation of an entity, and an imitation or false representation.
The set of properties describing a concept are not fixed. More properties can be added over time, and the understanding of the properties themselves can deepen. That is unlike a definition which must be replaced, a concept can be refined over time, representing the person holding that concept gaining a deeper and hopefully more accurate understanding of the entity the concept describes.
Finally the properties are concepts themselves. This means a concept is composed of other concepts, meaning a person’s total understanding, their total knowledge base would be represented as a large web of interconnected concepts.
The disadvantage of concepts in this context would be their ambiguousness and large size. It may not be possible to describe a concept in language, as the number of properties within the concept are impractically large, and as the properties are concepts themselves they each have their own set of underlying properties.
An allegory would be a computer file representing an image. The entity would be the image itself, the definition is a descriptive name of the image, and the concept would be the encoded information in the file itself, describing each individual pixel of the image, its color and position. The definition – the file name – is easy to communicate verbally, but cannot accurately capture the actual entity – the image. The concept provides a more accurate description, but can only be communicated verbally with difficulty.
Understanding both definitions and concepts may be helpful when thinking about a subject. If attempting to define something is difficult, it might be better to conceptualize it, and vice versa; If trying to communicate a huge thing is taking to long, it might be better to use a limited but adequate definition.