Choosing a Worldview
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69574/aejpr.v1i1.22846Keywords:
religious, secular, epistemic conservatism, pragmatism, fallibilism, worldviewsAbstract
If we accept that many, perhaps most, people have a religious or secular worldview of one kind or another, an interesting philosophical question is how we – all of us – should think about and act when it comes to choosing (if, indeed, we can choose) a worldview and what attitude we should adopt towards people who have a different worldview. I aim to shed some light on the intellectual and existential conditions for choosing or maintaining a worldview in a situation of significant worldview diversity. I will argue that when we become aware that we have a worldview and start to reflect on its content and its rivals, we should be guided by certain intellectual norms. These are the principle of epistemic conservatism, the fallibilistic principle of belief regulation, the principle of deep concern, the cautious principle of belief revision, and the principle of weak pragmatism. In this article, I will specify, more exactly, the content of these epistemic norms, give concrete examples of how they could and should regulate our religious or secular worldview formation, and give some reasons why we, in the first place, should accept them.
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