Overview
People's thoughts and actions can generally be traced back to their premises about the basic nature of knowledge and of reality. Most often, those premises are only implicit: most people have not thought carefully about their basic beliefs, much less tried to validate them. Many mistakes in thought and action ultimately arise from confusion about these basic questions. Ultimately, in fact, all of our views on specific questions of ethics, the market, or politics—and the policies and institutions we implement based on those views—depend on what kind of philosophical foundation we have established. Without a common foundation, we could argue endlessly about practical problems without ever understanding one another, much less arriving at agreement.