Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, Chapter 27: Chapter 7

Rescher's Chapter 7 does something the rest of the book doesn't quite prepare you for: it treats foundationalism not primarily as a philosophical position but as a *cultural inheritance* — the Euclidean model of axiom-to-theorem carried forward from Aristotle like a liturgical form long after the congregation stopped believing. The chapter's real weight is in how it frames the infinite regress problem not as a logical puzzle to be solved but as the structural crack that was always there, papered over by prestige. Foundationalism needs "basic beliefs" that justify themselves, but every candidate for self-justification turns out to be either trivial or smuggling in assumptions from elsewhere. Coherentism enters not as a triumphant replacement but as what you're left with once you stop pretending knowledge has a floor — a network model where justification is lateral, not vertical, and nothing touches bedrock because there is no bedrock. What's striking is that Rescher doesn't let coherentism off easy either; he's already laid the groundwork in Chapter 2's fallibilism to suggest that *any* systematization of knowledge is a truth-estimate, which means the choice between foundations and webs is less about which is correct and more about which metaphor does less damage.