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enewbern's picture

Foundationalism

As has already been mentioned by several people already, Prof. Dalke's discussion gorup tried to define foundationalism. We came up with something along the lines of a grounded idea, but even that didn't really seem to sit well with everyone. I believe that it is a very difficult term to define or even to replace with another word as we also attempted to do in class with little success. I think that foundationalism should maybe have a looser definition than just  grounded or something fixed, eternal, and un-changing. Something about those definitions rankled about; they felt a little too set in stone. So I decided to look up the term foundation on the online Oxford English Dictionary. It is defined at length but I found the following to be most helpful in forming my idea of foundationalism: 1) the action of founding or building upon a firm structure;the state or fact of being founded and/or 2) The action of establishing, instituting, or constituting on a permanent basis. On the basis of that definition, I think that foundationalism is some idea or theory that can be built upon like a foundation for a building; something that can be permanent in some way if left alone, but not necessarily unchangeable, because I don't really believe that anything is completely unchangeable.

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