Glossary
There are a lot of neologisms (newly-coined terms) involved in synjective worldview studies! But I don’t want synjectivism or worldview studies to be inaccessible.
These terms exist to make it easier to talk & be specific about these ideas, not to purposefully confuse, frustrate, or alienate people. They are intended to be tools for critically engaging with belief systems.
Some of these terms are meant to be used meant to be used more generally, and others are intended for critical analysis, and may be more niche. Do not feel the need to digest them all at once!
This glossary aims to be as plain-language as possible while still being specific and clear about the terms & the ideas behind them. Also, you will see the word “credal” a lot. You don’t necessarily have to use that every time you use one of these terms, assuming its clear from context.
Note: This glossary will talk about individual people & their worldviews, for simplicity. However, these terms can just as well apply to groups, communities, and societies.
Synjectivism
Synjectivism: a way of thinking that uses synjectivity as a tool to understand society, morality, politics, culture, religion, philosophy, and experience.
Synjectivity: a way of knowing that synthesizes objective and subjective knowledge.
Synjectivity is about understanding objective and subjective knowledge as (1) equally valuable, (2) distinct ways of creating knowledge, which (3) overlap and (4) rely on each other to make sense.
Knowledge: the applicable information we create from interpreting an experience a certain way.
Knowledge is “applicable” because it is used to further interpret experiences.
Experience: what it is like to be, do, or feel something.
Experience does not start as objective or subjective. We are objectively burned by a hot stove and experience subjective pain and fear, but in the moment, the physical burn and the pain and fear are not experienced separately.
Objectivity: a way of knowing that comes from what can be studied and proven repeatedly by anyone, given the same set of circumstances; strong objective knowledge is what has been studied and proven repeatedly by many honest people, and provides practical advice.
Examples of objective knowledge includes evolutionary biology, what you ate for lunch, and whether or not Cleopatra is alive.
Subjectivity: a way of knowing that comes from the interpretation of the unique, immaterial parts of experience, from the perspective of a certain person or group; strong subjective knowledge is what perspective best represents and communicates the experiences of the people and groups, and provides practical advice.
Examples of subjective knowledge include what is moral and immoral, how to pray, and what you dreamed last night.
Common reality: a set of shared experiences and knowledge which allows people to communicate objective and subjective information
We all live in multiple different common realities. These can be imagined as circles, some nested and some overlapping. We can find ourselves in physical reality (the first and largest), mainstream social reality, in our subcultural reality, in our personal reality, either all at once or going from circle to circle as needed to communicate.
Hyperobjectivity: a hierarchy of knowing that views objectivity as inherently more important, trustworthy, valid, and real than subjectivity.
Hyperobjectivity rarely denies subjective knowledge entirely, but it is treated as inferior, downplayed, ignored, and written off. Hyperobjectivity associates subjectivity with marginalized people’s experiences, and uses the language of objectivity to make the status quo seem natural and inevitable, and social change seem unnatural and irrational. Hyperobjectivity is one step on the path to fascist synjectivity.
Democratic synjectivity: a way of knowing that treats objective and subjective knowledge as equally important and real, and brings them together to form a complete picture (styled after democratic modernity)
Fascistic synjectivity: a way of knowing that purposefully blurs the lines between objectivity and subjectivity, treating them as interchangeable, with the goal of making people unable to make sense of the world, make decisions, or establish a common reality with each other
Fascist synjectivity can come from hyperobjectivity. When marginalized groups reclaim subjectivity and use it to raise awareness and resist the status quo, those in power respond by blurring the line between objectivity and subjectivity, making it difficult to establish basic facts and communicate experiences clearly.
Objectivization: applying objective standards to knowledge (as a verb: to objectivize)
Subjectivization: applying subjective standards to knowledge (as a verb: to subjectivize)
Worldview studies (general)
Worldview studies: a way of thinking that helps us discuss beliefs, values, and belief systems.
Worldview: the whole picture or system created by someone’s notions and practices, which helps them make sense of their experiences and make decisions throughout their life.
Also called a credal (pronounced “creedal”) web.
Notion: an interpretation of an experience
We form notions when we create objective or subjective knowledge from our lived experiences.
Belief: a notion that describes what we think the world is like, what kinds of things there are, and how things work
Examples include: “The earth is round”; “People have souls”; “America is special.” The focus is on what exists, where things come from, what is happening, and what can be done.
Value: a notion that prescribes how the world should be, what kind of things should exist, and how we should behave.
Examples include: “Carbs are bad”; “You should not lie”; “Everyone deserves healthcare.” The focus is on what matters, good vs. bad, desirable vs. undesirable.
Credal knot: a tight bond of 2 - 4 notions that rely on each other to make sense. After 4 notions, it is often more useful to consider it a credal thread.
Whether something is an individual notion or a knot is, to a certain extent, subjective. In general, if you pry into a notion, you can probably find a way to describe it as a knot. But you can also generally make a good case for why any given knot makes sense as a single notion.
Credal thread: multiple notions that often found together, and create common or reoccurring trends and themes in a person’s worldview
Credal threads can be the next evolution of a credal knot (5+ notions that rely on each other to make sense). But they can also be any set of notions that work together to make sense, and notions can belong to multiple credal threads.
Practices: the ways that beliefs and values are acted out through our behavior.
Examples include: Voting Republican because of a belief in the danger of immigrants; praying the rosary because of you value piety; dieting because of a belief that it will make you healthy, and being healthy is a obligatory value
Disposition: patterns in their practices over time, and how these patterns reinforce or re-shape their beliefs and values.
Patterns of practices can reinforce or re-shape our notions by creating habits. These habits can make our notions feel more normal, natural, and necessary, but they can also help establish new beliefs and values as normal, natural, and necessary.
Credal environment: the social and material conditions of a credal subject that provide the experiences that are interpreted by a worldview.
The credal environment can have a variety of impacts on the worldview. Notably, it can lessen or increase credal dissonance and encourage or discourage credal tending.
Sensemaking: the process of interpreting (making meaning out of) experiences.
“Sense” is the meaning of an experience, particularly meaning that is made from reflection. “Common sense” is the common set of meanings assigned to common experiences.
Storytelling: a basic sensemaking practice where we use a narrative to (re-)experience and (re-)define our notions and how they relate to each other.
Stories, fables, and/or myths (all terms could apply) are the result of storytelling.
Credal tethers: the notions which are most influential and load-bearing in a person’s worldview, and which tie other notions to one another and make them work together.
Credal needs: the impacts a person needs their worldview to have in order to feel confident, stable, and secure.
Credal desires: the instinctive interests and wants people have, which make them find certain notions, practices, frames, aesthetics, and communities especially fulfilling and desirable.
The difference between credal needs and desires is largely subjective. “Needs” is intended to describe things that a person requires in order for their worldview to be useful and healthy, while “desires” are meant to describe things that draw a person to a certain notion, practice, or frame.
Credal competence: the collective skills associated with developing and practicing one’s beliefs and values effectively and beneficially. Competence comes from existential trust, security, and confidence.
Existential trust: a person’s feeling that their worldview aligns with reality.
The person can apply their beliefs and values to their lived experiences, because they trust their perception of the world makes sense.
Existential security: a person’s feeling that the practices that come from their worldview have the desired impact on reality
The person can act on their beliefs and values, because they feel secure in their ability to impact the world in the way they seen as ideal.
Existential confidence: a person’s feeling that they can use their worldview to make sense out of new experiences and make the right decision in unexpected situations
The person can active and engaged in living their life, because they feel confident in their ability to make sense of the world even when it surprises them.
Credal literacy: the skill of recognizing, understanding, and critically engaging with beliefs, values, and practices. Literacy comes from critical reflectiveness,, acceptance of change, and tolerance of ambiguity and sensation
Credal literacy measures how capable you are of productive credal tending. It is a skill that gets stronger through study and practice. High credal literacy means a person is able to reflect critically and creatively on their beliefs and values; they seek to come to terms with and make sense of impermanence rather than avoid or deny it; and they are able to appreciate subjective (bodily, emotional, conceptual) experiences without rushing to explain and label them.
Credal dissonance: a conflict between a person’s worldview and their sense of reality, or a conflict between notions, or notions and practices
This creates a “gap” in a person’s worldview, where the web fails to effectively make sense and provide useful guidance. Many people do not consciously recognize these gaps, but feel them as “sore spots” in their belief system. Dissonance is a natural, normal, and healthy part of a living worldview.
Credal space: the amount of conscious recognition given to a particular notion or practice in someone’s worldview; how much attention a notion or practice gets
Credal tending: the humble, compassionate, and curious exploration of a notion or practice; approaching it in earnest to understand why you hold it, what it serves, how it interacts with other notions, etc. Also called “worldview work.”
Credal tending is a vital part of credal competence, and both self- and community-care. We can resolve dissonance through tending, by giving a notion enough space to explore why we hold it and why it is dissonant. But if someone struggles with tending (especially if they lack the skills, knowledge, or support necessary) they will likely “build around” the dissonance, like a splinter, adopting other notions to maintain credal competence and to avoid triggering the “sore spot.”
Credal wound: an experience of a rupture in a person’s existential trust, security, and/or confidence, profoundly weakening their credal competence.
This occurs when dissonance that was never tended to becomes undeniable, and a person is forced to confront a failure in their worldview. This causes the loss of existential trust, security, and confidence. Despair and negative feelings towards the world, others, and/or themself, especially if the dissonance was buried for a long time and many notions were build around it, are common.
Credal collapse: an experience where the rupture of a credal wound leads to the total loss of credal competence, and a person no longer feels they can rely on their existing worldview at all.
This term is generally synonymous with “existential crisis” or “crisis of faith.” Credal collapse puts someone in a very vulnerable situation, and those experiencing it should be gentle with themselves, seek healthy support systems, and take plenty of time to rebuild their existential trust, security, and confidence. The collapse of a worldview does not mean the end of meaning, safety, or personhood.
Credal tools: intentional notions, threads, and practices that people can use to tend to their worldview. Ideally, these make credal tending easier, help us meet our credal needs and desires, and develop credal competence and literacy. However, credal tools can also be used to cause harm.
Examples include affirmations, CBT reframing, journaling, meditation, prayer, witchcraft, bodily awareness, reality testing, grounding exercises, divination, dialectal thinking, mythic storytelling, thought experiments, role-play
Credal frame: a specific set of threads and relevant disposition that are grouped together, which different people can adopt as a way of ordering one’s own worldview (in whole or in part, see credal fields); it is the “frame” that the “web” is spun inside of, which changes how the web is structured and shaped. Frames allow us to easily adopt entire networks of notions and give clear examples of how to practice them.
Examples include religions, spiritualities, philosophies, political ideologies, conspiracy theories, familial cultures, scientific frameworks, social trends, subcultures, friend group cultures, fandoms, etc. People usually have multiple overlapping frames, which can interlock nicely or cause friction. Credal frames help people easily establish common realities, but they can also make it more difficult, depending on the frame.
Worldview studies (analytic)
Credal field: categories used to organize notions based on what experiences they focus on. These categories are themselves notions, and are made up based on usefulness. The same notion or thread can fall under multiple fields.
Fields include the Personal-Interpersonal (notions relating to the self and its interactions with other-selves; “who am I?” “who am I to you?” “who are you to me?”); Sociocultural (notions relating to living in a society; “who are we? who are they?”); Political (notions relating to how society should be organized; “how do we live together?”); Bioenviromental (notions relating to the physical world and the body; “what are we? where are we?”); Existential/Spiritual/Philosophical/Religious (ESPR) (notions relating to the transcendental, metaphysical, abstract; “what does this mean?”)
Credal subject (or) credal actor: the person or group at the center of a worldview; the “main character” who is doing the believing, valuing, and practicing that makes up a worldview
Credal identity: the credal subject’s own perception and interpretation of their worldview and what it says about them.
A person may have multiple credal identities; for example, a public stated identity, a conscious private identity, and an unconscious hidden identity. Groups can also have collective credal identities.
Credal tropes: describable patterns in how people interpret common experiences, and the notions and practices they create in a worldview.
Examples include good vs evil, nature as mother, flood myths, divine as unknowable, physical disease as spiritual pollution
Notional context: the relationship between a specific notion and the wider worldview it is a part of; includes notional tension
Notional context can be figured out by looking at a notion from five different angles: structural (how important is it?), semantic (what exactly does it mean to you?), functional (what is it doing for you?), affective (how does it make you feel?), and relational (what and who helped you form this notion?)
Notional tension: a trait of a notion; how much it strains other notions and causes dissonance
Notion activation: When a notion is used to make sense out of an experience, it has been activated.
Notions may come across differently when activated in different situations with different notions.
Credal energy: The subjective conscious intensity associated with an experience, which leads to the activation of notions.
Energy can be observed through bodily sensations, emotional responses, and mental excitement. Credal energy is interpreted, which draws boundaries and relationships. This makes the experience “make sense.” When experience is productively made into sense by notions, the energy is “burned off.” If an experience is very common and mundane, it is easy to make sense from it and little new knowledge is created. If it is a completely new experience, or a uniquely intense or impactful one, it make take time to interpret, but we can create new knowledge when we make sense of it.
Window of Useful Interpretation (WOUI): the range of possible interpretations a person can apply to a particular experience, that leads to desirable and practical outcomes
In general, objective knowledge has smaller and clearer WOUIs, and subjective knowledge has broader and blurrier WOUIs. Synjectivism helps us navigate how these windows and interpretations can stack.
Stated notions: the beliefs and values that a person believes they hold; the notions that make up a person’s credal identity
Hidden notions: the beliefs and values that show up in a person’s disposition, but are not stated
The person may or may not be aware these notions are part of their worldview, and they may or may not be part of their credal identity. Most if not all people have at least some hidden notions. Hidden notions can change how other notions are interpreting things.
Cover notions: the beliefs and values from a common reality that are stated, but they either do not show up in practice, or which use common exoterica to obscure highly specific esoterica.
Example: “keeping the peace” being invoked to justify committing acts of brutal violence against people protesting for an end to war
Metanotions: notions that are about the subject’s worldview specifically, as well as worldviews, meaning, knowledge, and reality in general.
Metanotions can be activated anytime, but become particularly active when a worldview is shifting or collapsing. When other notions are weak or falling apart, metanotions often become very present. Metanotions are often the most load-bearing but potentially most obscure tethers. During credal collapse, metanotions can quickly become extremely important as they tell us how to navigate the loss of meaning.
Credal objects: the thing that a notion refers to, a “credal noun” which defines the boundary and identity of a thing. A credal subject is a type of object; “subject” and “object” are not opposites here
Like nouns in language, credal objects can have actions performed on them, perform actions, have traits attributed to them, and be in relationship with other objects. Credal objects can include both material and conceptual things, because worldviews interpret both. Anything that can be interpreted within a worldview can function as a credal object.
Credal exoterica: the parts of a notion that are easily communicated through words, symbols, and stories; what shapes general ideas of a notion and are often largely similar.
Examples include the notion of JUSTICE is communicated through the word “justice”; the symbol of a blindfolded woman with a scale; a story where the bad guy goes to jail
Credal esoterica: the parts of a notion that are more abstract and not easily communicated; what experiences and notions shape exactly what this notion means and how it is expressed in practice
Examples include frameworks of punitive vs restorative justice; underlying cultural ideas of what is moral and immoral; the social and political motivations of those meant to carry out justice; the unique and visceral emotions, sensations, memories associated with “justice”
Credal objects: the thing that a notion refers to, a “credal noun” which defines the boundary and identity of a thing. A credal subject is a type of object; “subject” and “object” are not opposites here
Like nouns in language, credal objects can have actions performed on them, perform actions, have traits attributed to them, and be in relationship with other objects. Credal objects can include both material and conceptual things, because worldviews interpret both. Anything that can be interpreted within a worldview can function as a credal object.
Credal role model: a credal object that is seen by a credal subject as having a disposition that is desirable (”Its good to be like them”) or undesirable (”Its good to be not like them”).