You don’t see your worldview. You see through it.
Every conclusion rests on background assumptions that mostly go unexamined — what’s real, what counts as evidence, what’s valuable. Those assumptions don’t live in any single belief; they’re the frame the beliefs get built inside, which is exactly why they’re hard to notice from within.
The term traces to the German Weltanschauung, developed in 19th-century German philosophy (notably by Wilhelm Dilthey) to describe this kind of totalising, pre-theoretical orientation toward reality — distinct from any one opinion. Contemporary scholarship treats “worldview” as a genuinely contested concept with no single agreed technical definition; it gets used differently across religious studies, philosophy of science, and education research, though every use shares the same core claim — that reasoning never starts from nowhere.
A comparative history of the term across secular, Christian, and Islamic intellectual traditions treats this as a live definitional fight, not a settled one — each tradition builds “worldview” to encompass a different scope of reality, God, and knowledge.
Source: Hadi, F.S., Sani, H., & Allaham, N.R.K. (2021). “The History of Worldview in Secular, Christian, and Islamic Intellectual Discourse.” Tasfiyah: Jurnal Pemikiran Islam, 5(1). The standard English-language intellectual history is David K. Naugle’s Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans, 2002) — a monograph, not peer-reviewed, but the field’s standard reference.