The Epistemic Qualities of Foundational Knowledge
It is obvious enough that the mastery of foundational knowledge is a sine qua non to understanding and obtaining advanced knowledge in any given field or discipline. This not only makes foundational knowledge a highly efficient form of knowledge but also makes it indispensably worthy of pursuit. Though this much is intuitive, the significance of foundational knowledge can be better appreciated by an epistemic understanding of its qualitative features. It should first be mentioned that foundational knowledge is highly efficient in the sense that its fundamental principles within any given field are broadly interrelatable to not just other principles within the same field but often also to the fundamental principles of other fields. Naturally, foundational knowledge within a given field will have a great degree of interrelatability within the same field; it will not only be interrelatable to adjacent fundamental principles but in many cases also to intermediate principles within the s