 Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. They come stuck together with other ideas. These bundles of ideas form our worldview. Every worldview is structured like a tree. Each part is connected to another part. Leaves are connected to branches, branches are connected to the trunk, and the trunk grows out of its roots. The same is true for our worldview. The outermost part, the conclusions, are stuck to premises. Those premises are stuck to deeper premises, which ultimately grow out of their foundations. Leaves do not float in mid-air, and neither do our conclusions. Most people have a difficult time seeing past their conclusions to the premises that lay underneath. But if you care about the accuracy of your worldview, conclusions are largely irrelevant. They are at the end of a hierarchy. Our conclusions sprout from premises, and our premises sprout from foundations. Philosophy is about taking you from the leaves to the branches to the trunk, then down to the roots of your worldview. That's what we'll be doing in this series. If you care about the truth, then no ideas are more important. This is an excerpt from the book Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge, which is now available on Amazon.