The epistemological position that justified belief rests ultimately on basic beliefs that are justified without owing their justification to any other belief, stopping the regress of justification that would otherwise threaten to run on forever or in a circle. Descartes's search in the Meditations for an indubitable foundation, the cogito, is the paradigm early-modern statement; twentieth-century foundationalists debated whether basic beliefs must be infallible or only defeasibly justified, typically locating candidates in perceptual experience or introspective states. Foundationalism stands opposed to coherentism, which rejects any privileged basic tier, and to infinitism, which accepts the regress as genuinely endless.
Facts
Origin YearApproximate; Aristotles Posterior Analytics is conventionally dated to the mid-4th century BCE. Connections
Associated With
The Meditations' search for an indubitable foundation is the paradigm early-modern foundationalist project.
Source The Epistemic Regress Problem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In Branch
Sources
1. The Epistemic Regress Problem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The Epistemic Regress Problem, section on foundationalism
Foundationalism is a view about the structure of (epistemic) justification or knowledge. The foundationalists thesis in short is that (a) there are some basic or foundational beliefs that have a positive epistemic status without depending on any other beliefs for this status, and (b) any other beliefs with a positive epistemic status must depend, ultimately, on foundational beliefs for this status.
Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification, on Aristotle
Aristotle argued that not all knowledge is demonstrative (i.e., not all knowledge is based on an argument from other things known), and that some knowledge must be independent of demonstration (Posterior Analytics, I.3).
- Associated With: Rene Descartes
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