My Worldview

DEV CONCEPT: My Worldview is the member’s private workspace for uncovering, examining, and gradually understanding the worldview they already have. It should help the member see the knowledge, perspectives, beliefs, values, frameworks, experiences, and assumptions through which they interpret reality and themselves.

My Worldview is primarily descriptive and diagnostic rather than prescriptive. The goal is not to assign the member a worldview. The goal is to help them discover their own.

The conceptual foundation comes directly from 30 Philosophers, especially Chapter 7, “Heraclitus and Your Worldview,” along with OVM, the Idea of Ideas, Pragmatism, Personal Language, Personal Religion, and later TST worldview work.

Relationship to My Philosophy

My Worldview and My Philosophy are closely related but serve different purposes.

My Worldview: What do I currently think, believe, value, assume, and perceive—and why?

My Philosophy: Given what I understand about myself and reality, how do I want to live?

My Philosophy is the conscious, intentional layer of worldview. Discoveries made in My Worldview may eventually become principles, pillars, aphorisms, or other elements of My Philosophy, but nothing should move between the systems automatically.

Core Worldview Areas

• My Worldview Overview
  Give the member a simple evolving overview of their worldview. This should summarize rather than label. Over time it may highlight major themes, areas of confidence, areas of uncertainty, important influences, and subjects the member is still exploring.
• My Beliefs
  Allow members to explore specific beliefs and ideas by subject. For each important idea, consider capturing what they currently think, how confident they are, why they think it, and whether anything could change their mind.
• My Values
  Help members identify the values that shape their interpretation of life and their decisions. Values may eventually feed into My Philosophy, but should first be explored as part of worldview.
• My Frameworks
  Identify major frameworks the member uses to understand reality. Examples may include language, religion, science, philosophy, political frameworks, ethics, cultural traditions, or other systems of thought.
• My Personal Language
  Explore important words and concepts whose personal meanings shape how the member interprets reality. Words carry memories, emotion, culture, assumptions, and experiences in addition to dictionary definitions.
• My Personal Religion / Spirituality
  Allow members to explore their personal relationship with religion, spirituality, faith, doubt, the unknown, and the unknowable. This should describe their lived beliefs rather than forcing institutional labels.
• My Influences
  Explore where worldview came from: family, culture, religion, teachers, education, books, philosophy, media, communities, important experiences, and influential people.
• My Uncertainties
  Provide a comfortable place for “I don’t know yet.” Uncertainty should be treated as a legitimate worldview position, not as an incomplete answer that must be fixed.

Worldview by Topic

A person’s worldview is not one perfectly consistent position. Different subjects may be approached with different levels of belief, doubt, evidence, emotion, identity, and interest.

Consider organizing worldview exploration around topics such as:

• Reality and existence
• Knowledge and truth
• Science
• Religion and spirituality
• Human nature
• Free will
• Ethics and morality
• Meaning and purpose
• Politics and society
• Relationships
• Death and the afterlife
• The paranormal or supernatural
• Other member-created subjects

Do not require every member to complete every topic. The worldview should grow organically over time.

OVM Integration

The Open Viewpoint Method should be one of the core thinking tools inside My Worldview.

IMPORTANT: True Believer, Empiricist, and True Skeptic are OVM viewpoints, not permanent labels for people and not worldview personality types. The same person may approach one subject with strong belief, another empirically, another skeptically, and remain agnostic or uninterested in many others.

For important worldview topics, allow the member to deliberately examine all three OVM viewpoints:

• True Believer Lens: What does strong commitment see here? What assumptions or convictions support the idea?
• Empiricist Lens: What evidence supports the idea? What evidence challenges it? What degree of confidence is justified?
• True Skeptic Lens: What should be questioned? What assumptions may be hidden? What would justify withholding belief?

OVM should help the member examine a topic from several viewpoints before settling or revising their own position. It should encourage viewpoint prevention, not classify personalities.

Belief Position versus OVM Lens

DEV DISTINCTION: Keep the member’s actual belief position separate from the three OVM lenses.

A member may personally be a believer, skeptic, or agnostic about a particular idea while still deliberately examining that same idea through all three OVM viewpoints.

Where useful, agnosticism may be refined into forms such as explorative agnosticism or apathetic agnosticism.

Pragmatism / Worldview Calibration

Pragmatism should serve as a broad worldview-calibration concept. In TST, it asks how the member evaluates claims in relation to evidence, rational coherence, usefulness, identity, emotion, and reality.

TST recognizes three broad pragmatic postures:

• Empirical Pragmatism
  Attempts to keep worldview closely aligned with empirical and rational knowledge and minimizes unsupported commitments.
• Rational Pragmatism
  Accepts shared empirical and rational knowledge while allowing a limited set of personal, cultural, spiritual, or faith-based beliefs beyond public verification.
• Irrational Pragmatism
  Allows usefulness, preference, emotion, identity, or personal conviction to override empirical evidence or rational coherence.

These should be used carefully as calibration tools rather than praise words, insults, or permanent identities.

Do not simply announce: “You are an Empirical Pragmatist.” Help members see patterns in how they evaluate ideas and allow them to draw their own conclusions.

Possible Guided Question Pattern

For an important worldview idea or topic, a useful sequence may be:

1. What do you currently think?
2. How confident are you?
3. Why do you think this?
4. Where did this idea come from?
5. Is this primarily knowledge, belief, speculation, or uncertainty?
6. Does this claim describe public reality or primarily personal meaning?
7. What evidence supports it?
8. What evidence challenges it?
9. What could change your mind?
10. What would a True Believer notice?
11. What would an Empiricist require?
12. What would a True Skeptic challenge?
13. Does usefulness influence how strongly you hold the belief?
14. Does identity, culture, family, or tribe influence it?
15. Do you want to revisit this later?
16. Does anything discovered here belong in My Philosophy?

These should be available as tools and prompts, not a mandatory interrogation applied to every belief.

Worldview Evolution

Worldview is always evolving. My Worldview should reflect change rather than encourage the member to produce a supposedly final worldview.

• Allow answers and beliefs to be revised.
• Consider preserving important previous versions.
• Allow members to mark topics for later reflection.
• Show when important positions have changed over time.
• Celebrate thoughtful revision rather than consistency for its own sake.

Privacy and Profile Sharing

My Worldview should be private by default. Members may explore sensitive, uncertain, religious, political, philosophical, or unfinished ideas here.

Some elements may eventually be optionally shown on the member profile, but publication should always be intentional at the item or section level.

Never infer that an exploratory answer represents a permanent belief. Never automatically publish worldview classifications, uncertainty, OVM analysis, pragmatic posture, or unfinished reflections.

30 Philosophers / TST Integration

My Worldview can draw contextual learning material from throughout 30 Philosophers and TouchstoneTruth.

• Heraclitus / Worldview — worldview as personal, evolving interpretation.
• Confucius / Schemas and Normalcy — how experience creates categories and assumptions about what feels normal.
• OVM — viewpoint prevention and examining ideas through belief, evidence, and doubt.
• Plato and Aristotle — rationalism, empiricism, observation, and reason.
• Pyrrho — skepticism and suspension of judgment.
• Alhazen and later perception chapters — how senses, perception, and interpretation shape experienced reality.
• Idea of Ideas — empirical, rational, and irrational ideas.
• Pragmatism — how usefulness interacts with evidence, belief, identity, and truth.
• Material-Spiritual Framework — separating personal belief from claims about public reality.

Dev Comments

COMMENT: Do not build a worldview personality test. The member should uncover a nuanced worldview, not receive a score or a permanent philosophical label.

COMMENT: Avoid percentages such as “62% Empiricist” unless they later prove genuinely useful. They risk creating exactly the rigid labels that OVM is intended to prevent.

COMMENT: A worldview can contain tensions and contradictions. The software should help members notice them without demanding artificial consistency.

COMMENT: “I don’t know,” “I’m unsure,” and “I don’t care enough to decide” are useful worldview discoveries.

COMMENT: The most valuable long-term feature may be worldview history: allowing members to see how their beliefs, confidence, language, and perspectives changed over years.

COMMENT: My Worldview should feed My Philosophy intentionally. Discover first. Reflect and calibrate. Then choose what belongs in the philosophy the member wants to live by.

DEV TO DO

• DEV: Create My Worldview page and navigation item.
• DEV: Keep My Worldview private and developer-only during initial build.
• DEV: Design My Worldview and My Philosophy data architecture together before creating the full database structure.
• DEV: Decide whether both modules should share a flexible member-created idea/reflection system underneath.
• DEV: Build initial Worldview Overview screen.
• DEV: Develop topic/category architecture.
• DEV: Build simple belief/reflection item editor.
• DEV: Add confidence and uncertainty controls.
• DEV: Add “Why do I think this?” reflection.
• DEV: Add source/influence tracking.
• DEV: Add “What could change my mind?” prompt.
• DEV: Build OVM three-lens exploration tool.
• DEV: Keep actual belief position separate from the OVM viewpoint exercise.
• DEV: Add Pragmatism/worldview-calibration material.
• DEV: Add Personal Language exploration.
• DEV: Add Personal Religion / Spirituality exploration.
• DEV: Add values exploration.
• DEV: Add frameworks and influences.
• DEV: Add flagged topics / revisit-later capability.
• DEV: Add intentional “Move/Add to My Philosophy” workflow for appropriate discoveries.
• DEV: Develop item-level profile visibility controls later.
• DEV: Add revision/history tracking later.
• DEV: Later surface appropriate worldview prompts, unfinished topics, or recent discoveries inside My TST.
• DEV: Later connect relevant 30 Philosophers chapters, TST vocabulary, papers, and Practice material contextually.