A worldview is, very basically, formed by tenets on the nature of the world and on the way of knowing it held by persons, social groups, intellectual currents or ethnic cultures. It is a term widely used in social sciences, but often left aside in daily research work because of being considered a vague term. Lax definitions are the reason, but such symbolic worlds will not disappear even if we do not refer to them, and we need operational and heuristic conceptualizations, both to analyze such symbolic parameters as a study objective and to refer to them as the appropriate understanding contexts of other topics. Here, definitions with a multidimensional structure that imply heuristic potential are specified as a solution; previous proposals are reviewed; the needs for improvement are set out; and a consequent conceptualization is proposed. Then onto-epistemic tenets of the main cultures on Earth and of history are briefly described as such worldviews, a case in Basque culture tested to assess the heuristic potential, and an outstanding ‘transversal’ implication is advanced: worldviews should not only be considered multidimensional concepts with heuristic potential, but also formed with areas around prototypes by cognitive-linguistic operators across the tenets.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.