Chapter 3: World Hypotheses and their Impact on Everyday Life

The concept of World Hypotheses was first developed by the philosopher Steven Pepper (1942). He was puzzled by the difficulties philosophers had in reaching agreement and proposed that the difficultly arose because different philosophers used different and irreconcilable explanatory systems or epistemologies.

Pepper argued that all people, including professional philosophers, make sense of new phenomena by applying metaphors from old, well understood phenomena. Pepper argued that there were four relatively adequate root metaphors in general use and from which the four World Hypotheses were derived. Most people probably use all four kinds of World Hypotheses, but most people “specialized” and use one or two most of the time. Pepper’s proposal was that two people who used different World Hypotheses might not be aware of their differences, but would be unable to find broad agreement.