My thoughts on thought

In the 17th century there was a scientific revolution. Newton and Galileo might ring some bells. Science, instead of religion or tradition or literature, became the model for "knowing" things. Philosophers began to apply this model to philosophy; and instead of logic or fancy thought progressions, Science became the basis on which philosophers of the time (Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume...) based their theories on how we can "know."

There were two camps of philosophic thought at this time. There were the Continental Rationalists, who asserted that rational intuition must be the basis of knowledge. These were the philosophers who used math and reason to reach conclusions. They invented calculus. They are famous for the phrase "I think, therefore I am."
The other camp of philosophers were called the British Empirialists. They claimed that our knowledge must be based on the intuitions we made from our senses. Abstract reasoning and experimentation based on what we saw or heard or felt would lead us to what is true.

These two camps of thought at one particular thing in common. There was a firm foundation of knowledge. One could extrapolate other theories and hypotheses using inference, but all true theories and all solid ideas came from either a firm foundation of mathamatics or reasoning based on the senses. Bear with me, I'm almost to my main idea.

The idea that there is a firm foundation of knowledge insists that there is at least one true thing that we can know and that all of our other knowledge will come from that one particular thing. If we know that gravity works the way it does, or addition and subtraction work the way they do, and we treat this as TRUTH, the rest of physics and advanced math will follow.

Empiricism and this Continental Rationalism have been seen as massive failures in light of postmodernism. Philosophers now assert that sense experience is unreliable and cannot be a firm foundation for what "is" and neither can math or reasoning. Philosophers now insist that the biggest mistake any thinking person can make is to believe that there is a foundation for truth or thought. We aren't supposed to hold anything as "true" and work from there. There is nothing that is true and there is no foundation. The biggest fallacy in modern philosophy is this foundationalist theory.

Now to my point.

This is a load of crap.

My question to my philosopy teacher after going over this today was this:
Me: If we don't have a foundation for knowledge, and are not trying to find a foundation for knowledge then how do we know what anything else we find out, or think we know, is true?
Him: That is a good question... (long pause)... Well, the short answer is that we are trying to find out what most likely will be true or what is most probably true. But we can't say that we have a foundation for knowledge in a particular area or theory because we don't know enough yet....

Again. Load. Of. Crap.

My question remains- Even if we are hoping to find something that is the most probable or most likely to be true, shouldn't we still have some concept of truth? If we are trying to find out how probable it is that the bus will come on time, don't we have to know the bus schedule, and that the bus has come before?

Sorry for the following rant. If you are a postmodernist please skip over.
I am so sick and tired of people saying that we can't know anything for sure. "False" -Dwight Schrute. "We have educated ourselves into stupefaction."- Ravi Zaccharias. Not even my philosophy professor, who has a doctorate in philosophy can explain how we can even do anything with out some sort of foundation. If we don't have a foundation for knowledge, then what is the point on which we can jump off into other regions of thought and theory. If we don't know for certain that the earth is round, what are we doing exploring the rest of space?

My point is this: No one will ever know anything true about anything if the foundation of that knowledge is false. If our foundation is false, that which is built upon it may make sense in relation to the foundation BUT IF THE FOUNDATION IS FALSE SO ARE ALL THE RIDICULOUS THEORIES. To know anything, we must know something first.

To know anything, we must know something first.