Online research in philosophy

A general theory of coherence is proposed, in which systemic and relational coherence are shown to be interdefinable. When this theory is applied to sets of sentences, it turns out that logical closure obscures the distinctions that are needed for a meaningful analysis of coherence. It is concluded that references to “all beliefs” in coherentist phrases such as “all beliefs support each other” have to be modified so that merely derived beliefs are excluded. Therefore, in order to avoid absurd conclusions, coherentists have to accept a weak version of epistemic priority, that sorts out merely derived beliefs. Furthermore, it is shown that in belief revision theory, coherence cannot be adequately represented by logical closure, but has to be represented separately.

As Elijah Millgram reports, the idea of coherence has received widespread use in many areas of philosophy.(1) He argues that coherentist approaches have suffered from a woeful lack of specification of what coherence is and of how we can tell whether one theory in science, or ethics, or everyday life is more coherent than another. The exception he recognizes is the computational treatment of coherence problems that Karsten Verbeurgt and I have developed.(2) On this account, a coherence problem consists of a set of elements connected by positive and negative constraints, and a solution consists of partitioning the elements into two sets (accepted and rejected) in a way that maximizes satisfaction of the constraints. Algorithms have been developed that efficiently compute coherence by maximizing constraint satisfaction.

The impossibility results of Bovens and Hartmann (2003, Bayesian epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press) and Olsson (2005, Against coherence: Truth, probability and justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) show that the link between coherence and probability is not as strong as some have supposed. This paper is an attempt to bring out a way in which coherence reasoning nevertheless can be justified, based on the idea that, even if it does not provide an infallible guide to probability, it can give us an indication thereof. It is further shown that this actually is the case, for several of the coherence measures discussed in the literature so far. We also discuss how this affects the possibility to use coherence as a means of epistemic justification.

The article advocates a particular coherence theory of justification that emphasizes the significance of explanatory relations. It is shown that other approaches to coherence have failed because they underestimate the importance of explanatory theories in forming a system of beliefs. Additionally, a conception of explanation as a unifying substantial embedding of models is sketched that closely conforms with the proposed theory of coherence.

In this paper I discuss the foundations of a formal theory of coherent and conservative belief change that is (a) suitable to be used as a method for constructing iterated changes of belief, (b) sensitive to the history of earlier belief changes, and (c) independent of any form of dispositional coherence. I review various ways to conceive the relationship between the beliefs actually held by an agent and her belief change strategies (that also deal with potential belief sets), show the problems they suffer from, and suggest that belief states should be represented by unary revision functions that take sequences of inputs. Three concepts of coherence implicit in current theories of belief change are distinguished: synchronic, diachronic and dispositional coherence. Diachronic coherence is essentially identified with what is known as conservatism in epistemology. The present paper elaborates on the philosophical motivation of the general framework; formal details and results are provided in a companion paper.

Reasoning by jurors concerning whether an accused person should be convicted of committing a crime is a kind of casual inference. Jurors need to decide whether the evidence in the case was caused by the accused’s criminal action or by some other cause. This paper compares two computational models of casual inference: explanatory coherence and Bayesian networks. Both models can be applied to legal episodes such as the von Bu¨low trials. There are psychological and computational reasons for preferring the explanatory coherence account of legal inference.

This paper evaluates four competing psychological explanations for why the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached the verdict they did: explanatory coherence, Bayesian probability theory, wishful thinking, and emotional coherence. It describes computational models that provide detailed simulations of juror reasoning for explanatory coherence, Bayesian networks, and emotional coherence, and argues that the latter account provides the most plausible explanation of the jury's decision.

Many contemporary philosophers of law agree that a necessary condition for a decision to be legally justified, even in a hard case, is that it coheres with established law. Some, namely Sartorius and Dworkin, have gone beyond that relatively uncontroversial claim and described the role of coherence in legal justification as analogous to its role in moral and scientific justification, on contemporary theories. In this, I argue, they are mistaken. Specifically, coherence in legal justification is sometimes specific to a branch of law, and there is nothing isomorphic to this in the models of moral and scientific justification. Although Dworkin and Sartorius rely on the concept of coherence, they do not explicate it. In the course of examining their views, this essay offers a partial analysis of coherence on their models. Finally, two canons of relevance, governing when global coherence considerations are appropriate to legal justification, are presented.

This paper argues for a coherentist theory of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law, according to which a hypothesis about the events being litigated is justified if and only if it is such that an epistemically responsible fact-finder might have accepted it as justified by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. It claims that this version of coherentism has the resources to address a main problem facing coherence theories of evidence and legal proof, namely, the problem of the coherence bias. The paper then develops an aretaic approach to the standards of epistemic responsibility which govern legal fact-finding. It concludes by exploring some implications of the proposed account of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law for the epistemology of legal proof.

This paper examines the concept of coherence and its role in legal reasoning. First, it identifies some problem areas confronting coherence theories of legal reasoning about both disputed questions of fact and disputed questions of law. Second, with a view to solving these problems, it proposes a coherence model of legal reasoning. The main tenet of this coherence model is that a belief about the law and the facts under dispute is justified if it is “optimally coherent,” that is, if it is such that an epistemically responsible legal decision-maker would have accepted it as justified by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. Last, looking beyond the coherence theory, the paper explores the implications of the version of legal coherentism proposed for a general theory of legal reasoning and rationality.