Anti-Foundationalism

Philosophy

The term anti-foundationalism is of recent popularity. It is used to refer to any epistemology that rejects appeals to any basic ground or foundation of knowledge. Anti-foundational epistemologies thus include many that predate the recent spread of the term itself. Examples of anti-foundationalism surely include much postmodernism, poststructuralism, and pragmatism, as well as much of the analytic philosophy done in the wake of W. V. O. Quine or Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Anti-foundationalism commonly leads to various other philosophical positions. The most widespread are meaning holism, social constructivism, interpretivism, and historicism. Let us consider them in turn.

Given that we cannot have pure experiences, our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation. Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world because our experiences of those objects must in part be constructed using our prior theories. Thus, anti-foundationalists [Page 54]conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not have a one-to-one correspondence with objects in the world but rather cluster together in whole webs. While anti-foundationalists have defended many different epistemologies, from pragmatism to radical skepticism, many of them conclude that we cannot justify isolated propositions; rather, any justification of a knowledge claim must be one that applies to a web of beliefs or research program. These kinds of epistemological ideas inspire anti-foundational critiques of the positivism and naïve empiricism found in much political science.

The meaning holism associated with anti-foundationalism has implications for social ontology. Meaning holism implies that our concepts are not simply given to us by the world as it is; rather, we build them by drawing on our prior theories in an attempt to categorize, explain, and narrate our experiences. Thus, anti-foundationalists typically uphold social constructivism. They argue that we make the beliefs and concepts on which we act and thus the social world in which we live. This social constructivism asserts not only that we make the social world through our actions, but also that our actions reflect beliefs, concepts, languages, and discourses that themselves are social constructs. This constructivist ontology inspires anti-foundational critiques of the reified and essentialist concepts found in much political science.

Meaning holism feeds into anti-foundational analyses of social explanation. It undermines reductionist attempts to explain actions by reference to allegedly objective social facts without reference to the relevant beliefs or meanings. The crucial argument here is that because people's beliefs form holistic webs and because their experiences are laden with their prior beliefs, we cannot assume that people in any given social location will come to hold certain beliefs or assume certain interests. To the contrary, their beliefs, including their view of their interests, will depend on their prior theories. Thus, anti-foundationalists conclude that social explanation consists not of reducing actions to social facts but of the interpretations of meanings in the context of webs of belief, discourses, or cultural practices.

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