You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Foundationalist theories of meaning, obsolete?

Shawn July 07, 2017 at 01:16 1425 views 0 comments
In general, foundationalism has been regarded as a waste of time. Postmodernism is essentially a philosophy that regards foundationalist attempts at understanding human behavior or the world as misguided.

Personally, as a Tractarian, I believe in the ontology of facts in logical space or 'state space'. It's what the logical positivists called 'objects' or 'simples' that constitute the behavior of a system. In a recent thread hereabouts, these 'simples' were called 'brute facts'.

I'm also a Platonist, which reinforces my foundationalist belief. I find it hard to believe that some premises or axioms can't be derived from a system to describe its long-term behavior.

So, what are your opinions on the matter? It seems to me that anti-foundationalism is the same as some sort of ontological solipsism, where one is only aware of their own sensory data/experience and asserts that you don't exist due to that fact.

Comments (0)