One could say that there are as many worldviews as there are people. However, worldviews as we define them refer to the overarching, collectively shared, ‘big stories’ through which humans make sense of their experience and world. These stories, value patterns, and meaning-making systems guide how whole communities or societies understand reality in a general sense.
These ‘big stories’ could therefore also be described as families of worldviews, with ample variety and different perspectives within a family, while sharing certain foundational assumptions and characteristic values and priorities.
Especially the traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews have been widely recognised by philosophers and sociologists as part of the historical-developmental trajectory of cultural epochs in the West. These value patterns have also been observed more globally in large-scale cross-cultural research (more on that below). These worldviews thus express larger patterns and structures that most of us are familiar with, and are often relatively easy to recognize.
You can see them as archetypes, or what sociologists call ideal-types. These are idea-constructs that depict ‘pure’ or idealised structures and patterns. That is, though they are recognisable in the world around us, they generally do not exist in these ‘pure’ forms, because social reality is inherently messy and complex. These ideal-types thus serve primarily as heuristics, or analytical tools, that help us put the seeming chaos of social reality in order, and ‘see the forest for the trees’.
While more worldviews could be added to our model, these four worldviews appear rather dominant in our world today, and quite useful for analyzing societal and political debates (e.g., see this blog or this study). Moreover, the distinction in four worldviews adds a lot of nuance and complexity, compared with most of the binary approaches used in the social sciences (as argued in this article).