Making worldviews work: A heuristic, a planet scan, a case and their transversal implication

Abstract

A worldview is, very basically, formed by tenets on the nature of the world and on the way of knowing it held by persons, social groups, intellectual currents or ethnic cultures. It is a term widely used in social sciences, but often left aside in daily research work because of being considered a vague term. Lax definitions are the reason, but such symbolic worlds will not disappear even if we do not refer to them, and we need operational and heuristic conceptualizations, both to analyze such symbolic parameters as a study objective and to refer to them as the appropriate understanding contexts of other topics. Here, definitions with a multidimensional structure that imply heuristic potential are specified as a solution; previous proposals are reviewed; the needs for improvement are set out; and a consequent conceptualization is proposed. Then onto-epistemic tenets of the main cultures on Earth and of history are briefly described as such worldviews, a case in Basque culture tested to assess the heuristic potential, and an outstanding ‘transversal’ implication is advanced: worldviews should not only be considered multidimensional concepts with heuristic potential, but also formed with areas around prototypes by cognitive-linguistic operators across the tenets.