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 same field. In so being, foundational knowledge functions to lay the through line to accessing advanced knowledge. Foundational knowledge within a given field is also, albeit to a lesser degree, often interrelatable to at least the fundamental principles of other fields (though perhaps not the intermediate principles unless the fields are themselves highly correlated).

Foundational knowledge integrates not just vertically but horizontally as well; it not only glues together intermediate knowledge (i.e., it deepens one’s knowledge base) but also other foundational knowledge (i.e., it broadens one’s knowledge base). This makes foundational knowledge a mechanism for both assimilating and conveying additionally obtained knowledge of the same or higher grade. Therefore—since complex principles are often merely more elaborate versions of the basics or are, at a minimum, at least informed by them—mastery of the basics allows one to not only systematically compress, comprehend, and assimilate a vast amount of knowledge but to also, when needed, decompress it for purposes of its application to something or for a careful study of some of its aspects. In this way foundational knowledge allows one to simplify and demystify many aspects of advanced areas of knowledge. Thus foundational knowledge helps facilitate a process and practice the sustained repetition of which leads to mastery at the most advanced levels of any art form.

The post-comprehension aggregation of a sufficient number of foundational principles, as the name suggests, lays an epistemic foundation upon which additional knowledge can be layered. Thus foundational knowledge functions as the platform that supports other related knowledge that is useful and germane. Due to its high degree of interrelatability, foundational knowledge not only integrates many pieces of knowledge but also facilitates the expansion of the implications of what is already known. In other words, foundational knowledge is knowledge that builds upon itself.

Ultimately, the efficiency of foundational knowledge lies in its broad relevance, applicability, and interrelatability. This makes foundational knowledge highly suitable for developing models for assimilating and conveying further knowledge. On the other hand, advanced knowledge is not usually suitable for this purpose because it begins losing its efficiency (i.e., its interrelatability); it is uncommon or—perhaps, more accurately—not common enough to other areas of knowledge in order to be interrelatable. This renders advanced knowledge less reducible to a model and less communicable in terms of assimilating/conveying further knowledge and it is, unlike foundational knowledge, applicable under more limited and narrow circumstances.