World Views

Profound disagreements abound within most academic fields, including gifted education. Practitioners and scholars in the field of gifted education can become trapped within competing sets of implicit assumptions about the nature of intelligence, giftedness, creativity, and talent. Many arguments in this field, or in any academic field for that matter, arise from the incompatibility of philosophical assumptions held by differing groups of professionals. These assumptions are framed by several competing philosophical world views, which are based on a set of world hypotheses articulated by philosopher Stephen Pepper and elaborated by others since. World views are deep-rooted metaphors that guide our assumptions about the nature of reality. For example, some theorists denigrate the notion that a gifted person's intelligence can be captured by an IQ score, but others embrace IQ as an important measure of intellect. This dispute is rooted in the ways in which opposing world views frame our assumptions about the human mind. The world views include mechanism, contextualism, organicism, and formism.

These four competing world views implicitly shape scholars' beliefs about the nature of appropriate theories and investigative methodologies while guiding and confining practitioners' beliefs about the nature of appropriate instructional strategies and curriculum design. Strong adherence to a particular world view often gives rise to dogmatic insularity, which is the tendency to despise and dismiss viewpoints that differ from one's own. The problem of dogmatic insularity slows progress in a field or profession because the disciples of competing belief systems, or paradigms, have great difficulty finding common ground for progress. This entry provides descriptions of the world views and examples of world-view influence.