Nikolai's reference to worldviews

A dialog from the PhiloOfHi list, July 1999

Worldviews are my speciality. But not everybody likes the terminology. I am thinking of the world system analysists, in particularly; for example, Jonathan Friedman. He finds something equivalent to worldviews …. something like individiual citizens' consciousness of their own selves. Seemingly, a consciousness that owes much to preconscious as well as rational sources. Is there an another substitute phrase for worldviews, then?

Richard? wrote

>Is
>there an another substitute phrase for worldviews, then?

Personally, I prefer story, as in ‘This culture is living one story, and that culture is living a different one.’ But most don't like that.

Steven

Mark wrote:

> Chicken or the egg? I feel that the worldview “becomes”
> out of a sociosituational framework of social interactions and
> process, insteads of societies being a ‘tailormade’
> conception of worldview upon which they create themselves. Let's
> take the past 200 years for instance. Which was coming first here? Did
> people begin to get bored with ‘le ancien regime’ and
> ‘decide’ to do something about it? Or was it overall
> sociostructual changes baed on expanding market economies that
> disembedded other forms of peoplehood, knowlege, moralities,
> etc.—leaving a huge epistemic “hole” in the early
> 1800's.

[Steven]

I agree with you completely in what you have said, with one exception I guess. I don't see that our fundamental worldview has changed signifigantly in the last 7500 years.

The switch to annual agriculture is a special case, to me. Once piece of evidence that suggests to me a massive worldview change is that humans every bit as smart and ambitous as you and me lived for, what, 100,000 years without turning to annual agriculture.

When you talk of waves, ruins, rebuilding, etc, what I see are the waves that extend out after a small meteor falls into ocean. The waves rock boats, overturn some, crash into the shore, etc. But it's the meteor that started everything, not the waves.

And once you get over the narcotic of ‘optimism,’ it seems like a very ominous change. But this is part of ‘talking past each other’ as Kuhn calls it.

I should get to those references today. (Didn’t consider the request a knock at all. Delighted by it actually!)

Steven Kayser

This term was used by the person to whom I was responding, instead of myself. It's in the quotes. Ask him. ;-)

Regards,

Mark Whitaker

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