Essay on Worldview: Linguistic Relativity and Worldview

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DAYSTAR UNIVERSITY

ATHIRIVER CAMPUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION: COM 422

TOPIC: WORLDVIEW

PRESENTED BY: CHERYLINE MWENDE WAMBUA 09-1156

PRESENTED TO: MR. FRANCIS CHISHIMBA

DATE DUE: 17th MARCH 2010

WORLDVIEW A world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing natural philosophy, fundamental existential and normative postulates or themes, values, emotions, and ethics. It is also said to be (to a varying degree) and integral sense of existence and provides a framework for generating, sustaining, and applying knowledge. A worldview can simply be the way in which a person sees the world.
Writer Norman Geisler says that people do not see things as they are but as they appear to be purposes. This is analyzed in terms of basic believes about supernatural as it refers to God and the spirit.
The linguistic relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf describes how the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the Weltanschauung of a people through the organization of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorization of entities. As linguistic categorization emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception.
The theory, or rather hypothesis, was well received in the late 1940s, but declined in prominence after a decade. In the 1990s, new research gave further support for the linguistic relativity theory, in the works of Stephen Levinson and his team at the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen, Netherlands. The theory has also gained attention through the work of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University.
There are three layers in the building of a world view:
1. Values- this involves the values the person has been brought up with.
2. Institutional layer- these include education, law, and marriage.
3. The outer layer- this includes material artifacts and observable behavior.

A CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW
Everyone has a worldview. Whether or not we realize it, we all have certain presumptions and biases that affect the way we view all of life and reality. A worldview is like a set of lenses which taint our vision or alter the way we perceive the world around us. Our worldview is formed by our education, our upbringing, the culture we live in, the books we read, the media and movies we absorb, etc. For many people their worldview is simply something they have absorbed by osmosis from their surrounding cultural influences. They have never thought strategically about what they believe and wouldn't be able to give a rational defense of their beliefs to others.
The purpose of the Christian livelihood is to equip people to think and live with a consistent and cohesive Biblical worldview. I believe that God exists and that He is the standard by which we measure everything else. God created everything that exists and everything is held together by Him. I believe the Bible is God's divinely inspired Word, revealed to mankind (2 Tim. 3:16). I believe that the fullness of God came to earth and lived in the human body of Jesus Christ of Nazareth 2,000 years ago .I believe that mankind chose to rebel against God in the Garden of Eden and because of that act of rebellion, sin and death entered the world. I believe that believing in and obeying Jesus Christ is the only way to have eternal life or to be reunited with God. Truth is absolute, not relativistic, and can only be understood by submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the one who said "I am the way, the Truth and the life, no one can come to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)
While Christianity is believed by faith, it is most definitely a reasonable and rational faith. It answers the questions of the mind and the heart. We all live by faith. Some people have faith in themselves. Some have faith in
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