What is a Worldview?

A term that conflates a cultural mindset with the complexity of practices, tools, habits, concepts, and environments that make total societal way of doing-thinking possible. 

 Revolutionary disruptive social change, like the shift from an earth-centered universe to a sun-centered solar system in an open universe, is not a mindset change or a change in “worldviews.” The change is ontological and not subjective. It involves a change in “worlds” (see below). Thomas Kuhn, in his history of the shift from an earth-centered universe, is quite explicit about this stating that “after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world… [and] after the discovery of oxygen, Lavoisier worked in a different world.”

With an approach to large-scale social change where change happens in “worldviews” — only our “view” changes but the “world” stays the same. In this approach, change amounts to “seeing things differently.” But, how we see things emerges from how we do things with things. And in this, we are shaping our immediate environment and in turn, our environment is shaping us. Our world is not separate from us — it is not something “out there” to simply be seen one way or another. This is the very core of the Enactive approach to cognition.

For more see: Worlds, Worlding, World Making, World Blind