Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

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.

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
11 + 9 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.