Worldview

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland
barbara.lewandowska-tomaszczyk@konin.edu.pl

Worldview is a comprehensive perspective through which individuals interpret and understand the world around them. For Koltko-Rivera,for example, Worldview has been named with different labels through its use in philosophy, psychology, sociology, or culture. It is a particularly polysemous and rich concept. In an attempt to define its multilevel nature Koltko-Rivera proposes that worldview is ‘a way of describing the universe and life within it, both in terms of what is and what ought to be. [It is] is a set of beliefs that includes limiting statements and assumptions regarding what exists and what does not (either in actuality, or in principle), what objects or experiences are good or bad, and what objectives, behaviours, and relationships are desirable or undesirable. A worldview defines what can be known or done in the world, and how it can be known or done. In addition to defining what goals can be sought in life, a worldview defines what goals should be pursued. Worldviews include assumptions that may be unproven, and even unprovable, but these assumptions are superordinate, in that they provide the epistemic and ontological foundations for other beliefs within a belief system’.

In some philosophical approaches language is not considered a neutral system for expressing perception and conception, but rather as a factor that directly shapes them, the hypothesis known as language determinism and relativity, or as a Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In other words, the language we acquire influences the way we construct our vision of the world (hence, language determinism). And if this is so, then most probably different languages provide different visions of that same world (language relativity), i.e., distinct worldviews. The linguist who specifically rejected these ideas was Noam Chomsky, who posits instead a theory of Universal Grammar, shared as a common grammar, driven by a human faculty of language acquisition.

Keywords: language acquisition, language determinism, language relativity, sapir/whorf hypothesis, universal grammar

References:
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.
Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The psychology of worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3
Sapir, E. (1949). Selected writings in language, culture, and personality (D. G. Mandelbaum, Ed.). University of California Press.
Whorf, B. L. (1964). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In J. B. Carroll (Ed.), Language, thought and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (pp. 134–159). MIT Press.