Epistemology has traditionally sought to discover the foundations of knowledge. Recently, anti‐foundational philosophers have construed epistemo‐logy's failure to discover an ultimate ground to indicate the bankruptcy of foundational theory. On closer examination, however, the history of epistemology reveals the aim of foundational theory to be different both from the reductive ideal of its traditional defenders and from the unsystematic relativism that its recent critics offer instead. An alternative history of foundational theory reveals a progress toward multiple necessary foundations which is (...) the task of epistemology to articulate. (shrink)

The postmodern debate has been heavily influenced by often contradictory conclusions about the foundations of knowledge: hermeneutics challenges epistemology, politics challenges science, identity theory challenges critical theory, pragmatism challenges formalism, and so on. Horace Fairlamb contends that philosophy's foundationist quest has usually been misconceived as a choice between a 'super-science' and theoretical anarchy. Through an examination of the history of foundationism, and detailed analysis of the work of leading theorists including Fish, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas, Dr Fairlamb argues (...) for a less reductive and less arbitrary conception of knowledge and meaning. The result in this 1994 book is a sophisticated critique of contemporary theory with implications for philosophers as well as literary theorists, and an important contribution to the re-evaluation of theoretical discourse. (shrink)

Though Adam Smith believed that the spontaneous forces of the market set prices at the most productive level, he doubted that market forces price wages as fairly as the prices of other commodities. In fact, various observations by Smith suggest that the market tends to undervalue wages almost as naturally as it naturalizes the prices of most commodities under nonmonopolistic conditions. Those observations imply the germ of a capitalist theory of exploitation.

The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical (...) measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk. (shrink)