FOUNDATIONALISM

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its supplement, but the second does not require the first. A judgment, for example, requires as a founding moment the perception in which the object about which I judge is presented; the perception, however, does not require the judgment. Similarly, the functional properties of a tool depend on the presence of certain physical properties and features in the tool, but those physical properties do not depend on the functional ones. See also FOUNDATIONALISM . FOUNDATIONALISM . Foundationalism is a philosophical position that claims that there are bedrock or fundamental truths that underlie the justification of all other truths. These truths concern the w orld and all other truths about the world are logically derived from them, or they concern the nature of cognition and it is by reference to them that all other knowledge is justified. Once these truths are known, in other words, it is possible to determine the truth or falsity of all beliefs . There are, broadly speaking, three variants of the foundationalist doctrine: an empiricistic version that claims the bedrock truths are the incorrigible reports of immediate sensory experiences to which all other truths are logically reducible; a rationalistic version in which some nonempirical knowledge, of which we are infallibly or indubitably certain, provides a foundation for erecting a scientific system by means of deduction; and a transcendental version that claims to know necessary and universal structures o f cognition and determines the validity of different forms of cognition. On this last view, philosophy is foundationalist because it is a body of truths about other kinds of knowledge or truth. Husserl is frequently thought to be a foundationalist in the second or third sense (or both), but this view has been challenged. W hile Husserl is committed to the possibility of a complete, formal system of logic , he does not think that we can discover materially determinate truths from which we can deduce all other truths, and so he is not a rationalistic foundationalist. Husserl does think that we can determine the legitimacy of a particular experience as, say, a form of scientific thinking thereby distinguishing it from pseudo-science and this inclines him toward a transcendental foundationalism. But knowing these philosophical truths is insufficient to allow us to decide between competing genuine positions or to determine the truth or falsity of particular propositions. These decisions must be made within the natural attitude . And while Husserl is committed to a notio n of apodicticity , he distinguishes this apodicticity (in practice) from both infallibility and incorrigibility. Finally, while Husserl is clearly committed to a notion of foundations, these foundations are not such as to justify other experiences that are built upon them.