Relation to truth· Belief and knowledge
Foundationalism
Axis: Justification of belief — What makes a belief justified?
Knowledge rests on basic beliefs, immediately certain, that need no others to justify themselves: everything else is built upon them, like a building on its foundations.
Movements 1
Rationalismexplicit
Every justification, on pain of an infinite regress, must come to rest on principles that depend on no other: rationalism settles the matter by holding that these stopping points are first truths grasped with self-evidence by intellectual intuition, not ever-revisable sense data. This is a thoroughgoing foundationalism: knowledge is built like a deductive edifice, from axioms toward theorems, each step preserving the certainty of the last. Against , which backs justification onto singular impressions unable to ground the necessary, rational self-evidence alone can serve as the base, because it shows itself indubitable in the very act of being conceived.
Descartes, Meditations; Spinoza, Ethics
Philosophers 4
Descartesexplicit
The project of the Meditations on First Philosophy is expressly foundationalist: to tear down every doubtful opinion and rebuild knowledge on a single unshakeable first principle, the cogito, whose certainty then supports the whole edifice. Knowledge rests on indubitable foundations, not on the mere coherence of a web of beliefs.
Meditations on First Philosophy, I-II
Show inferred positions (3)
Husserlinferable
Husserl is resolutely foundationalist: he seeks a last and absolute foundation of knowledge, a base of originary evidences on which all the rest can be built without circle or regress. This bedrock is neither a coherence of the system nor the reliability of a process, but giving evidence, the thing showing itself in person. Phenomenology means to be "first philosophy", the discipline of principles that justifies the other sciences while borrowing nothing from them, which places Husserl with the Cartesian quest for an absolute beginning rather than with a web of mutually supporting beliefs.
Cartesian Meditations, First-Second Meditation · Ideas I, §24
Spinozainferable
The Ethics is demonstrated "in the geometrical manner": all knowledge is deduced from first definitions and axioms, and an adequate idea carries its certainty within itself, a true idea being its own standard. This is a rationalist foundationalism.
Ethics, I; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Lockeinferable
All our knowledge comes from experience: it is built up from simple ideas received through sensation and reflection, to which the mind can add nothing. These simple ideas form the base on which knowledge is erected, an empiricist foundationalism.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II
- Descriptive SituationShould you believe it?
Faced with a claim we cannot check for ourselves, what would make believing it justified: being able to trace it to first-hand evidence, its coherence with all we already know, or the reliability of the source it comes from?
a claim received - DescriptiveThe chain of reasons
Every belief rests on a reason, which rests on another: either the chain stops at beliefs that justify themselves, or it closes into a circle where each supports the others, or it runs off to infinity. These three exits are exactly the three ways of answering "what justifies a belief?".
the chain of reasons - DescriptiveAre there first evidences?
Foundationalism assumes beliefs that justify themselves, a perception or an evidence so immediate it needs no other. But do we ever perceive anything pure? Even "I see red" already draws on concepts, memory, learning: if there is no truly first given, what does the whole edifice rest on?
a basic belief