Whorf's hypothesis became influential in the late 1940s, but declined in prominence after a decade. As linguistic categorization emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception. The linguistic relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) describes how the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the worldview of a people through the organization of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorization of entities. Human beings take their place in speech and continue to modify language and thought by their creative exchanges.Įdward Sapir (1884–1939) also gives an account of the relationship between thinking and speaking in English. In stark contrast to linguistic determinism, which invites us to consider language as a constraint, a framework or a prison house, Humboldt maintained that speech is inherently and implicitly creative. Culture, language and linguistic communities developed simultaneously and could not do so without one another. Humboldt saw language as part of the creative adventure of mankind. The Prussian philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) originated the idea that language and worldview are inextricable. The linguistic map of the world (as seen here, as at October 2019) does not correspond precisely to the worldviews of the world.
The comparison of religious, philosophical or scientific worldviews is a delicate endeavor, because such worldviews start from different presuppositions and cognitive values. 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."
Ī 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. 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. Īdditionally, religious believers might not wish to see their beliefs relativized into something that is only "true for them". 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. If two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them. However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview – precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for. One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. Note that these distinctions are not always unequivocal: a religion may include economic aspects, a school of philosophy may embody a particular attitude, etc. These relate to various aspects of society and individuals' relationships with the world. There are a number of main classes of worldviews that group similar types of worldviews together. Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it. It is a concept fundamental to German philosophy, especially epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. The term worldview is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung ( listen), composed of Welt ('world') and Anschauung ('perception' or 'view').