Applied Worldview Engagement and Critical Evaluation
This domain tests whether you can evaluate a worldview fairly - stating it at its strongest, testing it by public criteria, and avoiding fallacy.
Criteria for evaluation
Sire and Ronald Nash propose tests including internal consistency, coherence, empirical adequacy, explanatory power, livability, and moral and existential adequacy. Arthur Holmes' Contours of a Worldview similarly tests against reason, experience, and practice. No single criterion is decisive; the task is comparative, asking which view bears the heavier explanatory burden.
Method
Read charitably, then steelman: state the position in its strongest form before evaluating. Separate core commitments from peripheral ones, and distinguish a worldview from its adherents' failures. Then test. This sequence prevents most deduction errors.
Fallacies that appear in candidate answers
- Straw man: refuting a caricature.
- Genetic fallacy: dismissing a view because of its origin.
- Ad hominem / tu quoque: scoring against the person or against hypocrisy rather than the claim.
- False dilemma: forcing two options when more exist.
- Appeal to consequences: inferring truth from comfort or discomfort.
- Question-begging: assuming the conclusion in the premises.
Worked example
Evaluate naturalism and theism on moral knowledge. Steelman naturalism: evolutionary pressures selected cooperative instincts, and moral norms are social technologies. Steelman theism: objective duties require a ground beyond human preference. Then test. Naturalism must explain why moral facts supervene on biology without debunking them (Street's and Joyce's evolutionary debunking arguments cut here). Theism must explain how divine commands or nature ground duties without the Euthyphro problem. Neither is refuted; each carries a cost. A scored answer names the cost on both sides.
Traps that cost marks
- Refuting a version nobody holds.
- Confusing 'this view is bad for society' with 'this view is false.'
- Treating tolerance as the claim that all worldviews are equally true - a position that undercuts itself.
- Ignoring internal diversity within a tradition.
- Substituting a label or quotation for an argument.