Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Read Free Page B

foundational principles a worldview expresses? Where do they come from? Are they theoretical, pretheoretical, presuppositional or a combination of the three? (This is addressed in chapter four.)
    Is a worldview primarily an intellectual system, a way of life or a story? (This is addressed in chapter five.)
    What are the public and private dimensions of worldviews? What relevance does this have to their objective and subjective character? What part does behavior play in an assessment of the nature of a person’s worldview? (This is addressed in chapter six.)
    If the initial definition of a worldview is inadequate, what more adequate one can be given? (This is addressed in chapter seven.)
    What role can worldview thinking play in assessing one’s own worldview and those of others, especially in our pluralistic world? (This is addressed in chapter eight.)

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    Worldview
    A Refined Definition
    When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body.
    Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

    I t is time to draw together the threads of this argument into a final definition of worldview . This will not be a definition that tries to incorporate all the characteristics of all worldview definitions. That is impossible, for the very concept of worldview is itself worldview dependent. Modern optimistic naturalists, scientists especially, think of worldviews as self-evident assumptions that allow almost certain knowledge of material reality. Post-Kantian idealists think of worldviews as innate mental structures through which we order and understand the phenomena of our lives. Postmodernists are likely to see worldviews as linguistic structures by which we construct our world and come to control it. Likewise, a Christian definition of worldview will depend on its prior commitment to the objective reality of the infinite-personal God who has created an intelligible cosmos.
    But this perspectival nature of worldviews does not commit Christians to relativism. Pluralism—the side-by-side existence of worldviews that are at least partially contradictory—is not relativism. Truth as classically understood among the Hebrews as well as the Greeks, the ancients as well as the moderns, is not relative. Truth as the way things are or the accurate representation in language of the way things are precludes relativism. The question is not whether there is a way things are. That insight is pretheoretical. The question is what Descartes meant when he considered truth to be one of the categories. Truth, as “the conformity of thought with its object,” he said, “seems to be a notion so transcendentally clear that no one could be ignorant of it.” 1 Alvin Plantinga notes, “Thomas Reid and others point out that the idea of truth , as a relation between beliefs and the world, is part of our native noetic equipment.” 2
    My definition of worldview , therefore, will necessarily assume that we hold our worldview to be the truth of the matter. If that is so, then the alternative definitions will be false in whatever way they contradict our own when our own is actually true. Of course, we could be wrong or partially wrong. But in a world where there is order, where chaos is not universal, where things are not “every which way,” there is indeed a way things are .
    Still, the history of worldview teaches us a great deal about the character of worldviews. My own refined definition of worldview owes much to that history, as I will point out in what follows.
    Worldview: A Refined Definition, Part 1
    The refined definition of worldview has two parts—a basic ontological definition and a list of questions that generate the presuppositions that characterize any specific worldview.
    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