Online research in philosophy

Among many reasons for which contemporary philosophers take coherentism in epistemology seriously, the most important is probably the perceived inadequacy of alternative accounts, most notably misgivings about foundationalism. But coherentism also receives straightforward support from cases in which beliefs are apparently justified by their coherence. From the perspective of those against coherentism, this means that an explanation is needed as to why in these cases coherence apparently justifies beliefs. Curiously, this task has not been carried out in a serious way in the anti-coherentist literature although there is no scarcity of objections to coherentism. The traditional charge has been that justification by coherence is circular. More recently the isolation problem allegedly reveals that coherentism justifies beliefs that should not be justified. Questions have also been raised with respect to the basing relation and feasibility.1 However, these objections do not explain why some beliefs appear to be justified by their coherence. This paper fills this gap in the anti-coherentist literature by offering a noncoherentist account of justification by coherence. The paper proceeds as follows. Section I delineates the framework of discussion and develops some conceptual tools needed in later analyses. Section II argues that there are genuine cases of an increase in existing empirical justification by coherence, but that it does not require coherence to generate additional justification—coherence serves as a channel of justification among beliefs, which is no more problematic than channeling of justification from basic to derived beliefs in foundationalism. Section III makes a stronger case for justification by coherence, where each of the coherent beliefs has no independent empirical justification; but Section IV argues that even in these cases coherence need not generate justification—coherence licenses the channeling of justification from outside sources..

One of the most influential arguments for the coherence theory of empirical justification is BonJours a priori argument from the internalist regress. According to this argument, foundationalism cannot solve the problem of the internalist regress since internalism is incompatible with basic beliefs. Hence, coherentism seems to be the only option. In my article I contend that this argument is doomed to failure. It is either too strong or too weak. Too strong, since even coherentism cannot stop the internalist regress in any legitimate way. In order to demonstrate this claim I will discuss various coherentist strategies. Too weak, since, were coherentism able to stop the regress, the argument against foundationalism would collapse.

This paper sets out to demonstrate that a contrast can be drawn between coherentism as an account of the structure of justification, and coherentism as a method of inquiry. Whereas the former position aims to offer an answer to the ‘regress of justification’ problem, the latter position claims that coherence plays a vital and indispensable role as a criterion of truth, given the fallibility of cognitive methods such as perception and memory. It is argued that ‘early’ coherentists like Bradley and Blanshard were coherentists of the latter kind, and that this sort of coherentism is not open to certain sorts of standard objection that can be raised against justificatory coherentism.

Alvin Plantinga and John Pollock both think that coherentism is a mistaken theory of justification, and they do so for different reasons. In spite of these differences, there are remarkable connections between their criticisms. Part of my goal here is to show what these connections are. I will show that Plantinga’s construal of coherentism presupposes Pollock’s arguments against that view, and I will argue that coherentists need not breathe their last in response to the contentions of either. Coherentism may be a mistaken theory of justification, but if it is, it is not shown to be so by either Plantinga or Pollock.

Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a relation mediated by the causal relationships among the evidence and a hypothesis, and we offer a framework for doing so by fitting together probabilistic models of coherence, confirmation, and causation. We show that the causal structure among the evidence and hypothesis is sometimes enough to determine whether the coherence of the evidence boosts confirmation of the hypothesis, makes no difference to it, or even reduces it. We also show that, ceteris paribus, it is not the coherence of the evidence that boosts confirmation, but rather the ratio of the coherence of the evidence to the coherence of the evidence conditional on a hypothesis.

In this paper I prove that holistic coherentism is logically equivalent to the conjunction of symmetry and quasi-transitivity of epistemic support and a condition on justified beliefs. On the way I defend Tom Stoneham from a criticism made by Darrell Rowbottom and prove a premiss of Stoneham’s argument to be an entailment of coherentism.

Coherentism is a theory of epistemic justification. It implies that for a belief to be justified it must belong to a coherent system of beliefs. For a system of beliefs to be coherent, the beliefs that make up that system must “cohere” with one another. Typically, this coherence is taken to involve three components: logical consistency, explanatory relations, and various inductive (non-explanatory) relations. Rival versions of coherentism spell out these relations in different ways. They also differ on the exact role of coherence in justifying beliefs: in some versions, coherence is necessary and sufficient for justification, but in others it is only necessary.

The discussion regards moral epistemology as the research of a proper methodology in moral thinking. Coherentism is proposed as the appropriate methodology in the individual context of moral thinking (because of the fact that all the alternatives to coherentism, at least understood as a regulatory ideal, are opposed to rationality), while a qualified form of consensualism is proposed as the appropriate methodology in the context of communitarian or public justification of beliefs.