Anti-foundationalism

From Geography

Anti-foundationalism, as the name implies, is a term applied to any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach. An anti-foundationalist is one who refuses a vision of knowledge as ' grounded in reality' or as charged with the task of 'reflecting' the world (Rorty, 1979).

A famous methaphor from Otto Neurath (Vienna Circle) wil crarify this anti-foundationalist thought. In the 1930s, Neurath wrote ( in Thagard & Beam 2010) :

There is no way of taking conclusively established pure protocol sentences as the starting point of the sciences. No tabula rasa exists. We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. Only the metaphysical elements can be allowed to vanish without trace. Vague linguist conglomerations always remain in one way or another as components of the ship.

Sources: Paul Thagard and Craig Beam Philosophy Department, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/epistemological.html Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the mirrow of nature. Priceton, NJ: Princeton University Press

does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge. foucault, Nietzsche