ABSTRACT
A world view that consistently fails to identify the season in which wild plants would bear edible fruit would not be a practical one for foragers dependent on those resources. The named concepts and the relations among them that comprise world views, therefore, are important elements of the filters through which we see and understand the social and physical environments in which people live. World views and scientific theories both serve as means for converting the seen into the observed, the mysterious into that which is understood. In a real sense, world views and scientific theories exist at two ends of a continuum. An approach to the world founded on doubt and uncertainty lacks the emotional appeal of world views that assure us of the built-in, possibly god-given, rightness of our basic understandings and beliefs. High-order theories, like world views, are filters through which reality is perceived, described, and explained.
