This blog has been a fantastic place to study “with” others. I am thankful for those readers who have taken the time to dialogue with me as I prepare for my oral exam next Wednesday the 21st. I ask that you continue to show grace toward me for a few more days as I expose my ignorance in hopes of becoming more educated. Today, I’d like to discuss the models of epistemology known as foundationalism and coherentism.
In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (from “Epistemology”) foundationalism is defined as follows:
“…our justified beliefs are structured like a building: they are divided into a foundation and a superstructure, the latter resting upon the former. Beliefs belonging to the foundation are basic. Beliefs belonging to the superstructure are nonbasic and receive justification from the justified beliefs in the foundation.”
Let’s use the example question, “How do I know that I exist?”
Some might argue that existence is a foundational belief. You don’t have to “prove” you exist. If you are asking “Do I exist?” then you must exist. I assume this doesn’t determine the nature of your existence. You could exist as a character in the dream of a deity, though your sense of self-awareness is a bit odd.
So existence is a “given” upon which you can build.
Coherentism is defined in the same article as follows:
“Knowledge and justification are structured like a web where the strength of any given area depends on the strength of the surrounding areas. Coherentists, then, deny that there are any basic beliefs. As we saw in the previous section, there are two different ways of conceiving of basicality.”
There is no “given” foundational belief. Again, let us ask, “How do I know that I exist?” Rather than assuming existence you have a series of ways of know that inform you that you exist and that affirmation that you exist informs other things you know. You know one thing because of your knowledge and beliefs about several other things.
If you were to “picture” these models foundationalism would be a house and coherentism a web. Foundationalism teaches that there are certain givens upon which you can build. Coherentism teaches that all beliefs are in a network dependent upon one another so that you always have multiple other reasons for affirming a given idea.
What would you say is the system that makes the most sense to you? Would you propose another?
the archives near Emmaus 
firstly brian i am truly and deeply thankful for you. having you here through facebook gives me a radar towards my thinking and craazy theories.
id imagine knowledge though built upon, to me, would be more like the web. we experience life through massive general sensations, whether it be the wind on our face, the ground beneath our feet, the clothes on our skin. its information coming at us, to us, from all around us.
foundationalism seems to require axioms which can not always be necessarily proven at the limits of itself. it also seems more stagnant than what actual life is. foundationalism seems to be a system of thinking as coherentism seems to be a system of sensations, which thinking requires a pause, a break in movement.
the more i think about it maybe foundationalism is a structure built upon coherentism, though i most likely do not know enough of either to say with assurance lol. anything given must start at a point, but a point cannot be enough for either epistemological models. each model requires many points, one builds vertically while the other builds horizontally. if i take each man individually, as we are in actuality, cohorentism seems to be more the model of knowledge.
Thanks, Brian, for the recent string of posts. I’d love for you have oral defenses more frequently, because you really seem to thrive under pressure. 🙂
As far as the question– personally, I feel that the middle-ground is dependence coherentism, in which epistemic justification need not come from beliefs (as is the case in standard, or doxastic, coherentism), but beliefs still cannot be considered basic (as is the case in standard foundationalism). Per dependence coherentism, subjective experiences (and perceived subjective experiences) are sufficient to justify beliefs. These need not be beliefs (against doxastic coherentism), nor need they be basic and irrefutable (against foundationalism).
Make sense? A fair summary? It’s been awhile since my epistemology classes, but as some who reads Kierkegaard several times a week, it’s a frequent topic of thought. I suspect Kierkegaard may even consider himself a coherentist, although please don’t ask me to defend it.
Juven
Thank you for the kind words. I lean your direction on this. I see “knowledge” as an intricate web. I don’t know that even “I exist” is merely a stand alone presupposition. I have dozens of reasons for thinking I exist and they inform how I answer the question. Even my presuppositions exist because of other presuppositions.
I do like how you framed it though, maybe these two come together in a coherent web of foundational beliefs from which spring other justified beliefs!
Eluros
It does make sense. I won’t ask you to defend your reading of Kierkegaard because I am sure you are far, far more familiar with him than I am.
I believe we experience a sense of foundationalism from our ways of knowing, but in reality, I believe the system of knowledge operates more like coherentism . In your example of existence, we arrive at the conclusion we exist given a sense of self-awareness, which I think relies heavily on empirical knowledge. We experience incoming information (empirical data) and our brains process what the data means, leading us to conclude we have knowledge. That knowledge forms the foundation of our basic beliefs, the most basic one being that we exist, as you pointed out. Within the limit of my ability to experience (as a human in space and time) I think I can safely say I exist, but that limitation causes me to wonder how much our “knowledge” is in fact dependent on the methods we use to obtain it, always influenced by our unique biases. If we trust our epistemology, then foundationalism seems plausible. Yet the complexity of the relationship between our ways of knowing and what we claim we know seem to support coherentism. However, in the end, I think we rely on foundationalism because it does indeed provide a basis on which we can practically live.
Mitra
Something we have left undefined here is “knowledge” as well. As I read your comment I get the sense that knowledge means something sure and objective, but we could include subjective experiences as well if they make the most sense of something and they are explained by other aspects of our knowledge base.
Brian,
There have been some important developments in the last several decades in linguistics which have a significant bearing on this issue. It isn’t just one school of thought but several which address how meaning is stored and accessed in structures sometimes referred to as cognitive frames and these frames are related to one another within complex networks. So the choice between a building metaphor and a network metaphor is not an either/or it can be both. This is language theory and not as far as I know related to foundationalism.
Theology has not really picked up on this, even K. Vanhoozer, I don’t recall any interaction with cognitive linguistics, scenario theory, or relevance theory in Vanhoozer publications on meaning. The big impact has been in translation theory. So you need not prepare for this, it will be a question in your exams.
Brian –
I am sure you are aware of Kenneth Sparks’ book, God’s Word in Human Words. It is somewhat like Pete Enn’s Inspiration & Incarnation, but on steroids (400 pages rather than 200 pages). 🙂 Anyways, the whole first chapter is on epistemology and how we know things. He compares the pre-modern, modern and post-modern approaches to epistemology. It has helped me appreciate more of a practical realism approach to epistemology, rather than a more foundational-Cartesian, modern approach.
C
I admit to being completely unfamiliar with those areas of study as well. Would you say that they create something like a network of foundations as others have proposed?
Scott
I know of Sparks’ book, though I haven’t read it, but I think I’m familiar with similar discussions elsewhere. I do hope to read that book someday.
Brian,
Not foundations, rather structures, something akin to semantic networks made up of frames which are a cognitive variant of the frames that were part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) work roughly forty years ago. A frame is represented grapicly as a data strutter with a header and slots that can be “instantiated.” It is really not mystifying when you see it represented as a information structure. The terminology is a bit off putting (like all linguistics) but the model is fairly lucid.
UBS had a Hebrew Lexicon project for the first decade of this century which was attempt to employ frame theory. I don’t know what has happened there. Project seems to dormant. There is online version freely available somewhere. Try this link:http://www.sdbh.org/home-en.html
The few translation consultants (Hebraists) I have chatted with about this agreed that the idea was a good one but they had reservations about the actually implementation. It easy enough to say we should dictionary of Hebrew using cognitive frames. Agreeing what the network is going to look like is a “knowledge engineering” project of major proportions. I made a serious effort to figure out the reasoning behind the semantic domain model, read R. de Blois dissertation front to back sever times. Concluded that my notion of a cognitive frames was fundamentally different than what the UBS project was using. Not necessarily better, just different.
The epistemological implications of this flavor of linguistics are unfortunately misunderstood by “defenders of the faith” as just another form of “postmodern” cultural relativism. I think that it would be a worthwhile project for some up an coming theologian who is not afraid of linguistics to map out what this body of theory means for the doctrine of scripture. Certainly, the “Chicago Statement” particularly the second part on hermeneutics would need to be revised.
One of the very basic insights this thinking about language is that texts by very nature are semantically indeterminate. This may sound innocent enough to people who grew up being “postmodern” but once again that is a case of imposing your worldview on the language model before finding out what its about.