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A worldview (also world-view) or Weltanschauung is said to be the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. However, when two parties view the same real world phenomenon, their world views may differ, one including elements that the other does not.
A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics. (1996). 9780292765696, University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292765696
The term Weltanschauung is often wrongly attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of German ethnolinguistics. However, Humboldt's key concept was Weltansicht. Weltansicht was used by Humboldt to refer to the overarching conceptual and sensorial apprehension of reality shared by a linguistic community (Nation). On the other hand, Weltanschauung, first used by Immanuel Kant and later popularized by Hegel, was always used in German and later in English to refer more to philosophies, ideology and cultural or religious perspectives, than to linguistic communities and their mode of apprehending reality.
In 1911, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey published an essay entitled "The Types of Weltanschauung and their Development in Metaphysics" that became quite influential. Dilthey characterized worldviews as providing a perspective on life that encompasses the cognitive, evaluative, and volitional aspects of human experience. Although worldviews have always been expressed in literature and religion, philosophers have attempted to give them conceptual definition in their metaphysical systems. On that basis, Dilthey found it possible to distinguish three general recurring types of worldview. The first of these he called naturalism because it gives priority to the perceptual and experimental determination of what is and allows contingency to influence how we evaluate and respond to reality. Naturalism can be found in Democritus, Hobbes, Hume and many other modern philosophers. The second type of worldview is called the idealism of freedom and is represented by Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Bergson among others. It is dualistic and gives primacy to the freedom of the will. The organizational order of our world is structured by our mind and the will to know. The third type is called objective idealism and Dilthey sees it in Heraclitus, Parmenides, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel. In objective idealism the ideal does not hover above what is actual but inheres in it. This third type of worldview is ultimately monistic and seeks to discern the inner coherence and harmony among all things. Dilthey thought it impossible to come up with a universally valid metaphysical or systematic formulation of any of these worldviews, but regarded them as useful schema for his own more reflective kind of life philosophy. See Makkreel and Rodi, Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, volume 6, 2019.
Anthropologically, worldviews can be expressed as the "fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives."
If it were possible to draw a map of the world on the basis of Weltanschauung, (1964). 9780262730068, Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . ISBN 9780262730068 Pp. 25, 36, 29-30, 242, 248. it would probably be seen to cross political borders—Weltanschauung is the product of political borders and common experiences of a people from a geographical region, environmental-climatic conditions, the economic resources available, socio-cultural , and the language family. (The work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza aims to show the gene-linguistic co-evolution of people).
According to James W. Underhill, worldview can periodically be used very differently by certain linguistics and sociology. It is for this reason that Underhill, and those who influenced him, attempted to wed metaphor in, for example, the sociology of religion, with discourse analysis. Underhill also proposed five subcategories for the study of worldview: world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal world, and perspective. (2025). 9780748638420, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748638420 (2025). 9780748679096, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748679096 (2025). 9781107532847, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107532847
If two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them.In the Christian tradition this goes back at least to Justin Martyr's Dialogues with Trypho, A Jew, and has roots in the debates recorded in the New Testament For a discussion of the long history of religious dialogue in India, see Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian
On the other hand, if different worldviews are held to be basically incommensurate and irreconcilable, then the situation is one of cultural relativism and would therefore incur the standard criticisms from philosophical realists. Cognitive Relativism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The problem of self-refutation is quite general. It arises whether truth is relativized to a framework of concepts, of beliefs, of standards, of practices. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Additionally, religious believers might not wish to see their beliefs relativized into something that is only "true for them". Pope Benedict warns against relativism Ratzinger, J. Relativism, the Central Problem for Faith Today Subjective logic is a belief-reasoning formalism where beliefs explicitly are subjectively held by individuals but where a consensus between different worldviews can be achieved.
A third alternative sees the worldview approach as only a methodological relativism, as a suspension of judgment about the truth of various belief systems but not a declaration that there is no global truth. For instance, the religious philosopher Ninian Smart begins his Worldviews: Cross-cultural Explorations of Human Beliefs with "Exploring Religions and Analysing Worldviews" and argues for "the neutral, dispassionate study of different religious and secular systems—a process I call worldview analysis."Ninian Smart Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (3rd Edition) p14
The comparison of religious, philosophical or scientific worldviews is a delicate endeavor, because such worldviews start from different and cognitive values. Clément Vidal has proposed metaphilosophical criteria for the comparison of worldviews, classifying them in three broad categories:
According to Apostel,Diederik Aerts, Leo Apostel, Bart de Moor, Staf Hellemans, Edel Maex, Hubert van Belle & Jan van der Veken (1994). "World views. From Fragmentation to Integration". VUB Press. Translation of Apostel and Van der Veken 1991 with some additions. – The basic book of World Views, from the Center Leo Apostel. a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive Mental model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:
Using a test of death-thought accessibility (DTA), involving an ambiguous word completion test (e.g. "COFF__" could either be completed as either "COFFEE" or "COFFIN" or "COFFER"), participants who had read the essay attacking their worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of DTA than the control group, who read a similar essay attacking Australian cultural values. Mood was also measured following the worldview threat, to test whether the increase in death thoughts following worldview threat were due to other causes, for example, anger at the attack on one's cultural worldview. No significant changes on mood scales were found immediately following the worldview threat.
To test the generalisability of these findings to groups and worldviews other than those of nationalistic Canadians, Schimel et al conducted a similar experiment on a group of religious individuals whose worldview included that of creationism. Participants were asked to read an essay which argued in support of the theory of evolution, following which the same measure of DTA was taken as for the Canadian group. Religious participants with a creationist worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of death-thought accessibility than those of the control group.
Goldenberg et al found that highlighting the similarities between humans and other animals increases death-thought accessibility, as does attention to the physical rather than meaningful qualities of sex.
According to Neo-Calvinist David Naugle's World view: The History of a Concept, "Conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church."David K. Naugle Worldview: The History of a Concept page 4
The Christian thinker James W. Sire defines a worldview as "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 construction of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being." He suggests that "we should all think in terms of worldviews, that is, with a consciousness not only of our own way of thought but also that of other people, so that we can first understand and then genuinely communicate with others in our pluralistic society."James W. Sire The Universe Next Door: A Basic World view Catalog pp. 15–16 (text readable at Amazon.com)
The commitment mentioned by James W. Sire can be extended further. The worldview increases the commitment to serve the world. With the change of a person's view towards the world, he/she can be motivated to serve the world. This serving attitude has been illustrated by Tareq M Zayed as the 'Emancipatory Worldview' in his writing "History of emancipatory worldview of Muslim learners".
David Bell has also raised questions on religious worldviews for the designers of superintelligences – machines much smarter than humans. (2025). 9781786237668, Grosvenor House Publishing Limited. ISBN 9781786237668
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