worldview

A worldview is the conceptual framework through which a person or community interprets reality — the organized map of categories, assumptions, values, and explanatory principles that determines what counts as real, true, or significant within a given culture or individual.\n\nParameters: A worldview comprises (1) a cosmology — a map of what kinds of things exist and how they relate, (2) an axiology — a hierarchy of what matters or is valuable, (3) an epistemology — criteria for what counts as knowledge or justified belief, and (4) a narrative structure — the story-form through which experience is sequenced and made meaningful. These components are interlocking: changing the cosmology reconfigures the axiology, and vice versa.\n\nPersistence: A worldview persists through language (the vocabulary and grammar that encode its categories), through teaching (formal and informal transmission across generations), through ritual (repeated performance that embodies and reinforces its assumptions), and through institutions (organizations that select, reward, and punish according to its standards). It is maintained not as a static doctrine but as a living interpretive lens — constantly tested against experience, revised at the margins, and defended at the core.\n\nA worldview is not any particular set of beliefs — it is the map-making apparatus itself, the system by which beliefs are organized, weighted, and deployed.