Coherentism: The Foundation of Foundationalism?

Grades are uploaded! Now I'm free to let my mind wander (and wonder) once again.

As a would-be foundationalist (who thinks the internal aspect of cognition is the most valuable) I'd like to have a theory of the foundations of cognition and a story of how we rationally build on those foundations. I'm inclined toward a view of the latter which extends the foundation via epistemic principles which are analytic (or possibly synthetic a priori). My worries about this have nothing to do with worries about analyticity or the synthetic a prior in general. Rather, I'm worried that even given all the conceptual resources the problem is merely relocated.

So I think it is self-evident that

(P1) If it seems to S as if P, then S is prima facie justified in believing P.

When I examine my concept of PF justification it includes seemings as sufficient. (Sorry if you don't have access to your own concepts, can't help you there.) I can *tell just by thinking about it* that seeming states fall under my concept of PFJ'ers. At times this sort of knowledge seems demon-proof but at other times not so much.
My onetime colleague Ted Poston holds that

(P2) Hosting an experience with content [P] in the assertive mood makes rational the belief that P.

is a basic fact of rationality. My now colleague John Shoemaker holds, I think, that

(P3) Being directly acquainted with the fact that P makes rational the belief that P

has some kind of basic status. (I wouldn't be a bit surprised if all three principles turn out to be coextensional in a broad range (all?) of cases.) On Tuesdays and Fridays I think that my beliefs about my concepts aren't in need of justification the way other beliefs are, but on other days I feel the need to say more.

One problem I'll not pursue now is that all these principles smack of coherentism. In each the fact that I host some state which has the same content as my belief and this is supposed to confer rationality. Modest foundationalist tend to allow that coherence provides justification anyway, since we seem to justifiedly accept many propositions on that basis. It seems that all non-classical F-ists need to give coherence a justifying role. This makes me worry that F-ism is unstable.

One way out of this quagmire is that suggested by Wittgenstein in *On Certainty*: that there are certain "hinge proposition" for which it is inappropriate in some way to ask for justification. They are in some way exempt from such considerations. I once would have been horrified by this suggestion but isn't an axiomatic system foundationalism par excellence? And clearly the axioms of an axiomatic theory cannot get non-circular justification *within the system*.

Now of course we do give arguments for axioms and so they are not basic in an ultimate sense. But when we do so, we usually argue on behalf of the axioms that they deliver the right result in intuitive cases at the level of theorems. But these particular cases could be reconceived as meta-axioms and *that* system acclimatized in a way where the axioms were truly basic.

At that level of analysis it seems to me reasonable to say that those axioms are exempt from rational consideration because they are that-according-to-which-all-assessments-of-rationalitiy-are-made. Accepting them is *constitutive* of the Rationality Game. If you fail to accept them, you're not playing the same game. If you try to justify them you will make a circular argument. I'm not sure whether this is better or worse than coherentism.