Continuing Thoughts on Worldview

Continuing thoughts on worldview: During the nineteenth century, the concept of worldview was used, under different nomenclature, by both idealists--phenomenologists, who believed that some kind of objective look at the world was possible--and existentialists, who believed that human action created meaning in the world. The phenomenologists-—Dilthey in the nineteenth century, Husserl and Heidigger in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—-wanted to see worldview as subordinate to a “scientific” philosophy, which could put forth an objective sense of what the world was “really” like, apart from particular perspectives on it. Such an approach continues to be attempted, for example by the modern textbook writer Ninian Smart in Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. The existentialists of the nineteenth century who are more direct precursors of twentieth century post-modernism-—Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche-—both stressed the irreducibility of worldview as a category of thought and action, with Kierkegaard calling it a “lifeview” more often than a “worldview.”

Positivist attempts to construct an adequate epistemology failed in the early twentieth century. David Hume’s critique of causality, which comes down to the challenge to “show me what a cause looks like,” has never really been refuted. All one can assert from an empiricist point of view is that events follow one another with more or less regularity. This makes inductive reasoning merely probable instead of indubitable. Phenomenological attempts to construct an objective “scientific” philosophy failed in much the same way.

The stage was set for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who essentially discarded phenomenological attempts to fix the referent of language somewhere “objective.” In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein attempted a rigorous account of reference, in the vein of what Bertrand Russell was attempting for mathematical reference in the Principia Mathematica. In the Philosophical Investigations, however, Wittgenstein abandoned thinking about reference, and instead began considering language as human action. Languages are structured as games, language-games, in fact (Wittgenstein’s nomenclature), whose rules are determined by “forms of life.” For Wittgenstein, forms of life create “world pictures,” his analogue to worldviews. Since Wittgenstein grounds everything in the human action of language (“meaning is use”), forms of life and world pictures are strongly language-dependent. That has led to questions about whether worldviews are completely dependent on the language in which they occur. But languages are inter-translatable, and people do modify their worldviews without necessarily changing their languages.