Empirical knowledge has traditionally been viewed as a structure of theories and hypotheses resting on a foundation that provides input from the world. Such a view is called foundationalism. This chapter will discuss the main versions of this theory and its alternatives along with Wilfrid Sellars's criticism that traditional versions of the theory rest on a myth.

Foundations and its alternatives

Hume subscribes to a foundations theory. He says that our beliefs carry us beyond memory and the senses, “yet some fact must always be present to the sense or memory, from which we may first proceed in drawing these conclusions”. When we learn about past ages from history, we must read the books, inferring one testimony from another “till we arrive at the eye-witnesses and spectators of these distant events”. If we did not arrive at some fact present to the senses, “our reasonings would be merely hypothetical, and however the particular links might be connected”, the chain of inferences would have “nothing to support it” and we could not “arrive at the knowledge of any real existence” by means of it (EHU: V i 45–6).

This requirement derives from the ancient skeptics.