Abstract

Novelty and emergence in the quest for foundations. The search for firm foundations for a given knowledge, notably in the case of a formalized one, can be seen as a particular case of the search for deeper intelligibility. It generally brings to modifying the structural elements of the received knowl-edge (this having to do with questions of ontological relativity and epistemological holism), letting appear new elements of thought and of ‘reality’, emergent conceptual structures on the ground of the preceding ones. We propose to show the link between the emergence of new kinds of knowledge, non thinkable previously, which enlarge the field of possible knowledge, and the effective “forward” motion of the search for foundations.