Reply to comment

As far as the foundationalist/ nonfoundationalist, fiction/ nonfiction opposites that we began discussing in Pr. Dalke's section on Thursday, I think there is sometimes but not always a correlation. A nonfiction story can clearly be either foundationalist or nonfoundationalist-- it can begin with a certain viewpoint and explicate it, or begin with a set of observation and construct a conclusion from them. I think that by definition, useful scientific theories are nonfoundationalist, because they begin with observations and the conclusion follows. In cultural anthropology right now, we're reading a lot about early anthropologists who were foundationalists, and who collected data to support their set ideas rather than the other way around-- mainly in the construction of racist theories. This kind of pseudoscience has been (largely) discredited. So all scientific stories are by nature emergent in the way they develop. Other types of nonfiction (history, biography, etc) I think could be either foundational or emergent, I'm not sure.

Fictional stories I think could be either foundational or emergent-- dependent on the ideas of the author, and constructed to promote those ideas, or written to explore certain themes without leaving a clear message. In a story that includes the perspectives of various characters, for instance, a more complicated picture emerges than could be told through one.

I'm not sure if I'm using the terms foundational and nonfoundational exactly as we did in class, but these ideas seem related. I'm writing more about whether the process of storytelling begins with a set foundation, than whether the story itself explains a phenomenon in terms of a foundation and destination.