Worldview Studies cheat sheet

Worldview definition (James Sire's functional sense): a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, expressed as a story or set of presuppositions that may be true, partially true, or entirely false, and that provides the foundation on which one lives.

Core worldview questions: What is prime reality? What is a human being? What happens at death? How do we know right and wrong? How do we know anything at all? What is the meaning of history?

Ninian Smart's seven dimensions: doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional, and material. Use them as a checklist for describing a tradition without reducing it to beliefs alone.

Worldview vs. ideology: a worldview is a pre-theoretical orientation that can be partly tacit; an ideology is an explicit, articulated, and usually politically mobilized system of ideas.

Presupposition vs. conclusion: a presupposition is methodologically basic (e.g., 'the senses are generally reliable'); a conclusion is derived (e.g., 'this bridge will hold').

Worldview test criteria used in comparative analysis: internal consistency, explanatory scope, coherence with evidence, livability, and capacity to account for the analysand's own reasoning.

Emic vs. etic description: emic reports insider categories; etic applies external analytic categories. Conflating the two produces category mistakes in comparative work.

Cultural-linguistic model (Lindbeck): doctrines function as community grammar rather than as first-order truth claims; the rival cognitive-propositional model treats doctrines as assertions about reality.

Genealogy caution: explaining why a belief arose (psychological or social origin) does not by itself settle whether the belief is true.

Christianity: one God in three persons; creation ex nihilo; humanity imago Dei; fall and redemption; incarnation and bodily resurrection; grace through faith; telos is communion with God.

Islam: tawhid (strict divine unity); Qur'an as final revelation through Muhammad; five pillars (shahada, salat, zakat, sawm, hajj); human role as khalifa; judgment and paradise or hell.

Judaism: one indivisible God; covenant with Abraham and Israel; Torah as instruction; mitzvot; this-worldly emphasis on justice and study; messianic expectation varies by movement.

Hinduism: Brahman as ultimate reality; atman as the self; samsara, karma, and moksha; diverse paths (jnana, bhakti, karma, raja yoga); theistic schools treat Brahman as personal.

Buddhism: no creator God in core teaching; Four Noble Truths; anatta (no permanent self); dependent origination; nirvana as liberation from dukkha; Theravada and Mahayana differ on Buddhahood and emptiness.

Confucianism: relational self constituted by roles; ren (humaneness), li (ritual propriety), xiao (filial piety); self-cultivation through education and ritual; social harmony as primary telos.

Daoism: Dao as ineffable source and pattern; wu wei (non-coercive action); ziran (spontaneity/naturalness); Zhuangzi stresses perspectival fluidity over fixed categories.

Sikhism: one God (Ik Onkar); ten Gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib; rejection of caste hierarchy; sewa (service) and simran (remembrance); karma and rebirth with eventual union.

Comparative caution: 'God' is not a univocal term across traditions; check whether a tradition affirms creation, personhood in the divine, and personal immortality before drawing parallels.

Classical theism: God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, personal, and creator; divine simplicity and aseity distinguish it from deism's non-intervening watchmaker.

Naturalism: only nature exists; typically entails methodological naturalism in science plus ontological naturalism as a metaphysical claim; the two are logically separable.

Pantheism identifies God with the cosmos; panentheism places the world within God while preserving divine transcendence; deism affirms a creator who does not intervene.

The problem of evil: logical form claims contradiction between evil and an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God; evidential form claims evil lowers the probability of theism. Free-will and soul-making defenses target the respective forms.

Cosmological argument: contingency and sufficient reason lead to a necessary being; standard objections concern the principle of sufficient reason and the possibility of an infinite past.

Teleological argument: fine-tuning and biological order suggest design; objections invoke observer selection and Darwinian mechanisms as alternative explanations of apparent design.

Kalam argument: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. Objections target premise one and the physics of cosmic origins.

Ontological argument (Anselm, Plantinga's modal form): a maximally great being exists in some possible world, so exists in all; objections concern whether existence can be a perfection.

Existentialism and postmodernism: existentialism locates meaning in authentic choice; postmodernism challenges metanarratives and the neutrality of reason, which bears on how worldviews can be adjudicated.

Deontology: duty-based; Kant's categorical imperative requires acting only on maxims universalizable without contradiction, and treating persons as ends, never merely as means.

Consequentialism: rightness depends on outcomes; utilitarianism aggregates welfare; act and rule versions differ over whether rules or individual acts are assessed.

Virtue ethics: evaluates agents and character; Aristotle's eudaimonia via habituated virtues and the doctrine of the mean between excess and deficiency.

Divine command theory: moral obligation grounded in God's commands; the Euthyphro dilemma asks whether the good is good because commanded or commanded because good.

Natural law: moral norms derived from human nature and teleology; Aquinas holds that basic goods are knowable by reason apart from special revelation.

Karma and dharma ethics: action and its consequences across lives; dharma as role- and stage-specific duty; the Bhagavad Gita's nishkama karma, action without attachment to results.

Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics: personhood constituted through relationships; filial piety and ritual propriety as the training ground for broader humaneness.

Metaethics distinctions: cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism; moral realism vs. anti-realism; descriptive, normative, and applied ethics as separate levels of inquiry.

Moral luck and incommensurability: outcomes partly beyond control affect blame; conflicting values may not admit a single common metric, which challenges simple aggregative models.

Epistemology types: foundationalism (basic beliefs support others), coherentism (beliefs justified by mutual support), reliabilism (justification by truth-conducive processes).

Justified true belief plus Gettier cases: truth, belief, and justification are necessary but not obviously sufficient for knowledge.

Falsifiability (Popper): a claim is scientific if it forbids some observable outcome; ad hoc rescue maneuvers reduce testability.

Paradigm shifts (Kuhn): normal science operates within a paradigm; anomalies accumulate; revolutions involve incommensurable standards rather than pure accumulation.

Research programmes (Lakatos): a hard core protected by auxiliary hypotheses; progressive programmes predict novel facts, degenerating ones only patch anomalies.

Underdetermination: evidence rarely entails a single theory; theory choice also involves simplicity, scope, and fruitfulness.

Methodological naturalism: science restricts itself to natural causes as a working rule; it does not by itself entail ontological naturalism.

Logic basics: modus ponens (P then Q; P; therefore Q) is valid; affirming the consequent (P then Q; Q; therefore P) is invalid.

Bayesian reasoning: posterior odds equal prior odds times likelihood ratio; base rates strongly affect posterior probability in diagnostic and historical claims.

Steel-manning: state the opposing view in its strongest form and confirm the restatement is acceptable before offering critique; failure to do so invites straw-man charges.

Logical fallacy checklist: straw man, false dilemma, begging the question, equivocation, genetic fallacy, ad hominem, and appeal to consequences.

Category boundaries: descriptive claims (what is) do not entail normative claims (what ought to be) without a bridging premise; watch for the is-ought gap.

Worldview conflict mapping: separate disagreements over facts, over interpretation of facts, over first principles, and over values, because each requires a different response.

Socratic elenchus: probe for consistency by eliciting commitments and testing them against counterexamples rather than asserting conclusions directly.

Tolerance vs. relativism: tolerance is a normative stance that presupposes the possibility of disagreement; relativism about truth undermines the grounds for criticizing harmful practices.

Dialogue norms: distinguish position from person, ask clarifying questions before rebuttal, and concede valid points explicitly to preserve the exchange.

Case analysis template: identify the worldview claim, its supporting evidence, its presuppositions, its rivals, and the strongest objection to each before judging.

Applied ethics integration: in bioethics and technology debates, trace how anthropology (what a person is) drives conclusions about consent, enhancement, and end-of-life care.