The politics of promise or threat and the praxis of hope: modeling a linguistic-phenomenological epistemology of practice for the assessment of alternative worldviews in media literacy

Abstract

At the outset, I discuss selected conceptions of world images put forward by philosophers pertaining to human experience and the social construction of reality. Herewith, I am trying to clarify distinctions between appearances and experiences of things in the world and the abilities of humans to construe worlds beyond words, along with their being-in-world, and experiencing their in-the-world existence. Subsequently, I confront some epistemological theories about the complexity of scientific knowledge of the world and its fragmentary perception in psychophysiological cognition. What is relevant for the theme, I present the methods of the lived-through research in dealing with the ideology of promise or threat expressed by leaders of social movements who offer a hope for better worlds which are not here and not now but can be achieved in the future. Lastly, I submit proposals to approach the relationships between world and reality in their hierarchical ordering and semiotic modeling.

Keywords

• linguistical epistemology
• phenomenology of practice
• alternative worlds
• media literacy
• experiential knowledge