Many years ago, Stephan Pepper (1942) proposed that the reason philosophers could never really agree was that they often employed different world hypotheses. These world hypotheses functioned to define the nature of truth, and might be described as working epistomologies. Pepper thought that a person employing one world hypothesis could never completely understand and agree with someone employing a different hypothesis. He identified four such world hypotheses, Formism, Mechanism, Organicism and Contextualism. For a Formist, truth is found in sorting observations into similarity-based categories. A Mechanist was primarily concerned with identifying cause-effect relationships. An Organicist saw everything as part of an organic whole, and was preoccupied with part-whole relationships and with development over time. Finally, the Contextualist was as concerned as the Organicist with identifying patterns, but looked on every pattern as dependant on the perspective and context of the observer.
A scale to identify world hypotheses in everyday people has been developed (Bethel et
al) and differences in preferred world hypotheses have been found to affect how easily
people can reach agreements, how they fare in psychotherapy, and in treatment for
hypertension. Recently we have found consistent differences among cultures in the world
hypotheses that most of their members prefer. (Lo, Y.H., Osaka, E. & Laird, J.D.
(1994) Cross-cultural comparisons of world views among five countries of college students.
Paper presented at meeting of the American Psychological Association.)