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.
This article reviews coherentism's recent history, and marks off
coherentism from other theses. The regress argument is the dominant
anti-coherentist argument, and it bears on whether coherentism or its
chief rival, foundationalism, is correct. Several coherentist
responses to this argument will be examined. A taxonomy of the many
versions of coherentism is presented and followed by the main
arguments for and against coherentism. After these arguments, which
make up the main body of the article, a final section considers the
future prospects of coherentism.
1. Introduction
a. History
British Idealists such as F.H. Bradley (1846-1924) and Bernard
Bosanquet (1848-1923) championed coherentism. So, too, did the
philosophers of science Otto Neurath (1882-1945), Carl Hempel
(1905-1997), and W.V. Quine (1908-2000). However, it is a group of
contemporary epistemologists that has done the most to develop and
defend coherentism: most notably Laurence BonJour in The Structure of
Empirical Knowledge (1985) and Keith Lehrer in Knowledge (1974) and
Theory of Knowledge (1990), but also Gilbert Harman, William Lycan,
Nicholas Rescher, and Wilfrid Sellars. Despite this long list of
names, coherentism is a minority position among epistemologists. It is
probably only in moral epistemology that coherentism enjoys wide
acceptance. Under the influence of a prominent interpretation of John
Rawls's model of wide reflective equilibrium, many moral philosophers
have opted for a coherentist view of what justifies moral beliefs.
b. Describing Coherentism
Epistemological coherentism (or simply "coherentism") needs to be
distinguished from several other theses. Because it is not a theory of
truth, coherentism is not the coherence theory of truth. That theory
says that a proposition is true just in case it coheres with a set of
propositions. This theory of truth has fallen out of favor in large
part because it is thought to be too permissive – an obviously false
proposition such as I am a coffee cup coheres with this set of
propositions: I am not a human, I am in the kitchen cupboard, I weigh
7 ounces. Even contemporary defenders of coherentism are usually quick
to distance themselves from this theory of truth.
Coherentism is also distinct from a thesis about concepts that
sometimes goes under the name "concept holism." Roughly, this thesis
says that possessing a particular concept requires possessing a number
of other concepts: for example, possessing the concept of
assassination requires also having the concepts of killing and death.
Concepts, according to the thesis of holism, do not come individually,
but in packages. What is crucial here is that neither concept holism
nor the coherence theory of truth say anything about the conditions
under which a belief is justified.
So exactly what does coherentism have to say regarding when our
beliefs are justified? The strongest form of coherentism says that
belonging to a coherent system of beliefs is
(1) necessary for a belief to be justified and
(2) by itself sufficient for a belief to be justified.
This view—call it strong coherentism—can be contrasted with two weaker
varieties of coherentism. Necessity coherentism just makes the
necessity claim at (1). It imposes coherence as what is often called
"a structural condition" on justification. Structural conditions just
tell us how beliefs must be related to one another if they are to be
justified. However, being related to one another in the required way
may not suffice for justification, since there might be additional
non-structural conditions on justified belief. A particularly lucid
statement of necessity coherentism can be found in the 1992 paper by
Kvanvig and Riggs. By contrast, strong coherentism can be thought of
as denying that there are any non-structural conditions.
When thinking about strong coherentism, it is important to appreciate
the by itself qualification in (2). This qualification sets
coherentism off from one of its most important rivals. The rival view
is typically classified as non-coherentist, but it still gives
coherence a supplemental role in justifying beliefs. This view claims
that coherence can boost the justification of a belief as long as that
belief is already independently justified in some way that is not due
to coherence. On this sort of view, coherence is sufficient to boost
beliefs that are independently justified. This, however, is not
thought to be strong enough to deserve the "coherentist" label. To
make coherence sufficient for justification in a way that deserves the
label, one must claim that coherence is sufficient, by itself, to
generate justification – in other words, coherence must generate
justification from scratch. Call this sufficiency coherentism. Notice,
also, that sufficiency coherentism allows other factors besides
coherence to be sufficient for justification.
Another role that non-coherentists sometimes give to coherence comes
in a negative condition on epistemic justification. This condition
says that incoherent beliefs fail to be justified. It might seem that
on this view, coherence is necessary for justification. But this only
follows if coherence and incoherence are contradictories. Below, we
will see reasons to think that they are not contradictories, but
instead contraries. This explains why a view that says that
incoherence disqualifies beliefs from being justified is not
classified as a coherentist view. More is required to get the claim
that coherence is necessary for justification.
There are real difficulties for circumscribing self-styled
coherentists. Not every self-styled coherentist subscribes to either
(1) or (2). For example, BonJour, in his 1985 book, held that meeting
the coherence condition is not sufficient for justification, since he
claimed that, in addition, justified beliefs must meet a distinctive
internalist condition. Moreover, since BonJour also held (and still
holds) that coherence is not necessary for the justification of a
priori beliefs, strictly speaking he did not hold that coherence is
necessary for epistemic justification either. Still his early view
should be classified as coherentist, since he claimed that coherence
is a necessary condition on a wide class of beliefs' being justified,
namely empirical beliefs.
In what follows, each argument for coherentism will be classified
according to whether it aims to show necessity coherentism, or
sufficiency coherentism (this will also cover arguments for strong
coherentism, since it is simply the conjunction of necessity
coherentism and sufficiency coherentism). Similarly, each argument
against coherentism will be classified according to whether it targets
necessity coherentism, or sufficiency coherentism (since an argument
that targets either of these views is also an argument against strong
coherentism, this will cover arguments against strong coherentism).
Following BonJour and much of the recent literature, the focus will be
on our empirical beliefs and whether there is a coherence condition on
the justification of these beliefs.
One more preliminary point is in order. Since necessity coherentism
just makes a claim about the structure that our justified beliefs must
take, it is neutral on whether coherence must be introspectively
accessible if it is to function as a justifier. In other words, it is
neutral on the debate between epistemic internalism and epistemic
externalism. So while the most important recent coherentists – namely
Laurence BonJour (1985) and Keith Lehrer (1974 and 1990) – have also
espoused epistemological internalism, this commitment is over and
above that of structural coherentism. This makes their views
incompatible with strong coherentism, since the internalist commitment
is an additional condition over and above that of structural
coherentism.
2. The Regress Argument
The Regress Argument goes back at least as far as Aristotle's Prior
Analytics, Book 1. Like many others, Aristotle takes it to support
coherentism's chief rival, foundationalism. The argument has two
stages: one that identifies all of the candidate structural
conditions; and one that rules against the coherentist candidate.
a. The Argument
The argument opens with the claim that some of a person's justified
beliefs are justified because they derive their justification from
other beliefs. For example, take my justified belief that tomorrow is
Wednesday. That belief is justified by two other beliefs: my belief
that today is Tuesday and my belief that Tuesday is immediately
followed by Wednesday. But, if my belief that tomorrow is Wednesday
derives its justification from these other beliefs, then my belief
that tomorrow is Wednesday is justified only if these other beliefs
are justified. Consider these other beliefs. One possibility is that
they derive their justification from yet further beliefs, in which
case they are dependent for their justification on those further
beliefs – if it is, we can shift our attention to these further
beliefs. The other possibility is that these beliefs are justified,
but their justification does not derive from some other justified
beliefs.
Three options emerge. According to the foundationalist option, the
series of beliefs terminates with special justified beliefs called
"basic beliefs": these beliefs do not owe their justification to any
other beliefs from which they are inferred. According to the
infinitist option, the series of relations wherein one belief derives
its justification from one or more other beliefs goes on without
either terminating or circling back on itself. According to one
construal of the coherentist option, the series of beliefs does circle
back on itself, so that it includes, once again, previous beliefs in
the series.
Standard presentations of the Regress Argument are used to establish
foundationalism; to this end, they include further arguments against
the infinitist and coherentist options. These arguments are the focus
of the second stage. Let's focus on the two most popular arguments
against coherentism which figure into the Regress Argument; and let's
continue to construe coherentism as saying that beliefs are justified
in virtue of forming a circle. The first argument makes a circularity
charge. By opting for a closed loop, the charge is that coherentism
certifies circular reasoning. A necessity coherentist will be charged
with making circular reasoning necessary for justified belief. A
sufficiency coherentist will be charged with making circular reasoning
part of something (namely, coherence) that is sufficient for justified
belief. But circular reasoning is an epistemic flaw, not an epistemic
virtue. It is neither necessary, nor part of what is sufficient, for
justified belief; in fact, it precludes justified belief.
The second argument takes aim at the claim that coherence is necessary
for justification. Since a belief is justified only if, through a
chain of other beliefs, we ultimately return to the original belief,
coherentism is committed, despite the initial appearance, to the claim
that the original belief is justified, at least in part, by itself.
This is supposed to follow from the coherentist corollary that if the
chain of supporting beliefs did not eventually double back on the
original belief, then the original belief would not be justified. But
the claim that my belief that tomorrow is Wednesday is justified (even
in part) by itself is mistaken – after all, it is derived, via
inference, from other beliefs. Call this, the self-support charge.
b. Coherentist Responses
Coherentists need not resist the first stage of the regress argument
since that stage, recall, just generated the candidate views. Their
responses focus on the second stage. That coherentism is the best of
the three candidates is argued for in several ways: by highlighting
shortcomings with infinitism and foundationalism, by giving positive
arguments for coherentism (we will look at these later in Section 4),
and by responding to objections against coherentism. Let's continue
with the two objections that have already been tabled, the circularity
and self-support objections, and examine some coherentist responses to
these objections.
Some coherentists have responded to the circularity charge by
suggesting that reasoning in a circle is not a problem as long as the
circle is large enough. This suggestion has not found much favor. What
is worrisome about circular reasoning, for example, that it is overly
permissive since it allows one to easily construct reasons for any
claim whatsoever, applies just as well to large circles of beliefs.
According to a more instructive reply, the circularity charge and the
self-support charge rest on a misconception about coherentism. Often
coherentists point out that their view is that systems of beliefs are
what is, in the first place, justified (or unjustified). Individual
beliefs are not the items that are primarily justified (or
unjustified). Put in this light, the whole approach of the regress
argument is question begging. For notice the argument had us begin
with an individual belief that was justified, though conditionally so.
Then we went in search of what justifies that belief. This "linear"
approach to justification led to the circularity and self-support
charges. Coherentism, however, proposes a "holistic" view of
justification. On this kind of view, the primary bearer of epistemic
justification is a system of beliefs. Seen in this light, both charges
seem to be question begging.
Some have argued that the move to holistic justification fails to
really answer the circularity and self-support charges. For even
granting that it is a system of beliefs that is primarily justified,
it is still true that a system of beliefs is justified in virtue of
the fact that the individual beliefs that make up the system relate to
one another in a circular fashion. And it is still true that a belief
must support itself if it is to be justified, since this is needed if
the relevant system of beliefs (and hence the individual belief) is to
be justified. It is not so clear, then, that the reply which
highlights the holistic nature of justification is successful.
However, by conjoining the appeal to epistemic holism with another
appeal, a coherentist might have a fully satisfactory reply. This
second appeal identifies another misconception about coherentism that
might lie behind the circularity charge and the self-support charge.
This misconception has to do with the variety of ways in which our
beliefs can support one another so that they come out justified.
Coherentists are fond of metaphors like rafts, webs, and bricks in an
arch. These things stay together because their parts support one
another. Each part both supports, and is supported by, other specific
parts. So too with justified beliefs: each is both supported by, and
supports, other beliefs. This means that among support relations,
there are symmetrical support relations: one belief can support a
second (perhaps mediately through other beliefs), while the second
also supports the first (again, perhaps, mediately). Beliefs that
stand in sufficiently strong support relations to one another are
coherent, and therefore justified.
This contrasts with foundationalism's trademark bifurcation of beliefs
into basic beliefs and non-basic beliefs. Basic beliefs do the
supporting; non-basic beliefs are what they support. According to
foundationalists, there are no symmetrical support relations. This
much is clear enough. The delicate issue that it raises is this: do
the circularity and self-support charges rest on an assumption that
beliefs cannot be justified in virtue of standing in symmetrical
support relations to one another? If the charges require this
assumption, then they might beg the question.
Consider the circularity charge first. To simply assert that circular
reasoning is epistemically defective and therefore cannot generate
justified beliefs seems very close to simply asserting that beliefs
cannot be justified in virtue of standing in symmetrical support
relations. What the opponent of coherentism must do is tell us more
precisely why circular reasoning is epistemically defective. While the
considerations they call on might well imply that symmetrical support
relations do not justify, they will be ineffective if they simply
assume this.
We are now in a position to see that the self-support charge is
importantly different from the circularity charge. Where the
circularity charge targets the coherentist claim that beliefs are
justified by standing in support relations that are mediated by other
beliefs but ultimately return to themselves, the self-support charge
focuses on an alleged implication of this, namely that beliefs are
therefore justified at least in part because they stand in support
relations to themselves. In slogan form: reflexive relations justify.
So what about the self-support charge? Does making this charge require
assuming that symmetrical support relations cannot justify? We need to
be careful. While the claim that the support relation is transitive
and the claim that supporting relations link back to a previously
linked belief implies that the relevant belief supports itself,
coherentists are not thereby stuck with the claim that this belief is
justified in virtue of supporting itself. Arguably, it is open to the
coherentist to hold, instead, that this belief is justified in virtue
of the circular structure of the support relations, while denying that
it is justified in virtue of supporting itself. Still, this may not be
enough, since the coherentist might still have to maintain that
justified belief is compatible with self-support.
3. Taxonomy of Coherentist Positions
Recall that strong coherentism says S's belief that p is justified if
and only if it belongs, and coheres with, a system of S's beliefs, and
this system is coherent. Central to this formulation are three
notions: the notion of a system of beliefs, the notion of belonging to
a system of beliefs, and the notion of a coherent system of beliefs.
Let's look at these in order. As we will see, each can be spelled out
in different ways. The result is that coherentism covers a wide
variety of views.
a. What is it to Belong to a Belief System?
What qualifies a set of beliefs as a system of beliefs? Partly, it is
the number of beliefs that make it up. Minimally, a system of beliefs
must consist in at least two beliefs. In a moment, we will see that
two is probably not enough. The other extreme – that the size of the
relevant system is one's entire corpus of beliefs – must be rejected,
on the grounds that any sufficiently strong incoherence would make all
of one's beliefs unjustified. This is implausible, since incoherence
in one's outlook on one topic, say set theory, should not affect the
epistemic status of one's outlook on an unconnected topic, say whether
one is presently in pain. Between these two extremes lie a number of
importantly different intermediate positions. There are a few general
approaches to carving out distinct systems of beliefs in a belief
corpus. Let's look at four.
One way of individuating systems of beliefs is by reference to their
subject-matters. For example, your beliefs about mathematical matters
might form one system of beliefs, while your beliefs about tonight's
dinner might form another. Alternatively, systems of beliefs might be
individuated by the sources that produced them: visual beliefs might
form one system, auditory beliefs another, memorial beliefs another,
and so forth. The third possibility involves individuating systems
phenomenologically. Beliefs themselves, or perhaps key episodes that
come with acquiring them, might have phenomenological markers. If
these markers stand in similarity relations to one another, this would
lead to grouping beliefs into distinct systems. A final possibility,
perhaps the most plausible one, involves individuating systems of
beliefs according to whether the beliefs that belong to a particular
system stand in some dependency relations of a psychological sort to
one another – for example, a psychological relation like that involved
in inference. We will return to this fourth possibility below.
Let's turn to the second notion, that of belonging to a system of
beliefs. According to straightforward accounts of this notion, for a
belief to belong to a system of beliefs, it must relate to the beliefs
that make up that system in just the same way that the beliefs relate
to one another if they are to constitute a system of beliefs. This
will involve one of the four possibilities that were just surveyed.
b. What is the Makeup of the Coherence Relation?
Coherence relations can hold among a set of beliefs that constitute a
system. Arguably, coherence relations can also hold between systems of
beliefs. On the simplest view, the latter occurs when the individual
beliefs that are members of the respective systems cohere with one
another across systems. As a result, the beliefs belonging to the
respective systems gain in justification. Here, I will focus on the
easier case in which a set of beliefs constitute a single coherent
system of beliefs.
A coherent system of beliefs has two basic marks. First, the beliefs
have to have propositional contents which relate to one another in
some specified way. Call this the propositional relation.
Additionally, it is plausible to think that the relevant beliefs must
be related to one another in one's psychology in some way, for example
by being inferred from one another. Let's look at the specifics,
starting with the propositional relation.
i. The Propositional Relation: Deductive Relations
We need to consider two relations from deductive logic: logical
consistency and mutual derivability. At a minimum, coherence requires
logical consistency. So a set of belief contents, p1, …. pn, is
coherent only if p1, …. pn neither includes, nor logically entails, a
contradiction. Logical consistency is far from sufficient, though,
since a set of beliefs in a scattered array of propositions can be
logically consistent without being justified. Consider, for example,
my belief that Joan is sitting, my belief that 2+2=4, and my belief
that tomorrow is Wednesday. While these beliefs are logically
consistent with one another, more needs to be in place if they are to
be justified.
This last set of beliefs illustrates another important point. While
coherentists will claim that this set of beliefs does not exhibit
coherence, it is at the same time implausible to claim that this set
is incoherent. It is not incoherent, since no one of the beliefs is in
direct conflict with, that is, contradicts, any of the others. It
follows that coherence and incoherence are contraries, not
contradictories. If a set of beliefs is coherent, then it is not
incoherent; if a set of beliefs is incoherent, then it is not
coherent; but as this last case illustrates, there are sets of beliefs
that fail to be coherent, but are not incoherent either. The fact that
coherence and incoherence are contraries explains the earlier point
about why deeming incoherent beliefs unjustified is not enough to make
one a coherentist. Just because a theory disqualifies incoherent
beliefs from being justified, it is not thereby committed to holding
that coherence is necessary for justification.
Consider, next, mutual derivability. Though it is plausible that
logical consistency is necessary for coherence, it is too much to
require that each believed proposition entail each of the other
believed propositions in the system. In fact, it is even too much to
require that each believed proposition entail at least one of the
other believed propositions. To see why these requirements are too
strong, consider these four beliefs: the belief that Moe is wincing,
the belief that Moe is squealing, the belief that Moe is yelling "that
hurts", and the belief that Moe is in pain. None of these beliefs
logically implies any of the others. Nor does the conjunction of any
three of them imply the fourth. Despite the lack of entailments,
though, the beliefs together seem to constitute a system of beliefs
that is intuitively quite coherent. So coherence can be earned by
relations weaker than entailment.
ii. The Propositional Relation: Inductive Relations
Many coherentists have required, in addition to logical consistency,
probabilistic consistency. So if one believes that p is 0.9 likely to
be true, then one would be required to believe that not-p is 0.1
likely to be true. Here probability assignments appear in the content
of what is believed. Alternatively, a theory of probability might
generate consistency constraints by imposing constraints on the
degrees of confidence with which we believe things. So take a person
who believes p, but is not fully confident that p is correct; she
believes p to a degree of 0.9. Here 0.9 is not part of the content of
what she believes; it measures her confidence in believing p.
Consistency might then require that she believe not-p to a degree of
0.1. In one of these two ways, the axioms of probability might help
set coherence constraints.
Besides being probabilistically consistent with one another, coherent
beliefs gain in justification from being inferred from one another in
conformity with the canons of cogent inductive reasoning.
Foundationalists, at least moderate foundationalists, have just as
much at stake in the project of identifying these canons. It is common
to identify distinct branches of inductive reasoning, each with their
own respective canons: for example, inference to the best explanation,
enumerative induction, and various forms of statistical reasoning. For
present purposes, what is crucial in all of this is that beliefs
inferred from one another in conformity with the identified canons
(whatever the exact canons are) boost coherence, and therefore
justification.
iii. The Propositional Relation: Explanatory Relations
To supplement the requirements of logical, and probabilistic,
consistency, coherentists often introduce explanatory relations. This
allows them to concur that the system consisting in the beliefs that
Moe is wincing, Moe is squealing, and Moe is yelling "that hurts"
coheres with the belief that Moe is in pain. In addition, it allows us
to disqualify the set consisting in my beliefs that Joan is sitting,
2+2=4, and tomorrow is Wednesday on the grounds that these
propositions do not in any way explain one another.
There are two ways that a proposition can be involved in an
explanatory relation: as being what is explained, or as being what
does the explaining. These are not exclusive. The fact there are toxic
fumes in the room is explained by the fact that the cap is off the
bottle of toxic liquid. The fact that there are toxic fumes in the
room, in turn, explains the fact that I am feeling sick. So I might
believe that I am feeling sick, draw an explanatory inference and
believe that there must be toxic fumes in the air, and then from that
belief draw a second explanatory inference and believe that the cap
must be off the bottle. In this case, that there are toxic fumes in
the air serves to both explain why I am sick and in turn serves as the
explanatory basis for the cap being off the bottle. Often what drives
coherentists to think that a coherent set of beliefs must consist in
more than two beliefs is that the needed explanatory richness requires
more than two beliefs.
Disagreement enters when coherentists say exactly what makes one thing
a good explanation of another. Among the determinants of good
explanation are predictive power, simplicity, fit with other claims
that one is justified in believing, and fecundity in answering
questions. The nature and relative weight of these, and other,
determinants is quite controversial. At this level of detail,
coherentists, even so-called explanationists who stress the central
played by explanatory considerations, frequently diverge.
Not all coherentists include explanatory relations among the
determinants of coherence. See Lehrer (1990) for example. Those that
do include them usually give one of two kinds of accounts for why
believed propositions that do a good job of explaining one another
increase coherence and hence boost justification. One kind of account
claims that when beliefs do this, they make each other more likely to
be true. On this kind of account, explanatory relations are construed
as ultimately being inductive probabilifying relations. On an
alterative account, explanatory relations are irreducible ingredients
of coherence, ingredients that are simply obvious parts of what
contributes to coherence.
iv. The Psychological Realization Condition
It is not enough that the contents of a person's beliefs happen to
cohere with one another. Another condition is needed. In the
cognizer's mind, these beliefs must stand in some relation to one
another. This extra condition might be incorporated into an account of
a belief system. Let's consider another way of incorporating the
condition. Suppose some coherentist elects to individuate belief
systems by the subject-matter of the belief contents. Such a
coherentist might then introduce a distinct psychological realization
condition, one that figures into an account of the coherence relation
rather than into an account of a system of beliefs. If the beliefs in
some system are to cohere with one another, they must interact with
one another – for example, by being inferred from one another.
On the inferential approach a belief coheres with the rest of the
beliefs in some system of beliefs only if it stands in one of two
inferential relations to beliefs in that system of beliefs: it might
be inferred from one, or more, beliefs in the system; or, it might be
a belief from which one, or more, beliefs in the system have been
inferred.
But inference is just one option. Arguably, another option would be to
impose a counterfactual condition. Roughly, this kind of condition
says that a belief coheres with other beliefs in the system to which
it belongs only if the following counterfactual conditional claim is
true: if the rest of the system were markedly different, in some
specified way, then the person would not hold that belief.
4. Arguments for Coherentism
Let's now survey some of the main arguments for, and against,
coherentism. This section reviews four arguments for coherentism. The
first attempts to show that coherence is sufficient for justification.
Three more attempt to show that it is necessary.
a. For Sufficiency: The Argument from Increased Probability
In An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, C.I. Lewis (1883-1964)
introduced a case that has been widely discussed. A number of
witnesses report the same thing about some event – for example, that
Nancy was at last night's party. However, the witnesses are unreliable
about this sort of thing. Moreover, their reports are made completely
independently of one another – in other words, the report of any one
witness was in no way influenced by the report of any of the other
witnesses. According to Lewis, the "congruence of the reports
establishes a high probability of what they agree upon." (p. 246) The
point is meant to generalize: whenever a number of unreliable sources
operate independently of one another, and they converge with the same
finding, this boosts the probability that that finding is correct.
This is so regardless of whether the sources are individual
testifiers, various sensory modalities, or any combination of sources.
Items that individually are quite unreliable and would not justify
belief, when taken together under conditions of independent operation
and convergence, produce justified beliefs.
This argument has been charged with several shortcomings. For one, it
is not clear that the argument, even if sound, establishes
coherentism. The argument appears to rest on an inference to the best
explanation, one that can be construed along foundationalist lines.
So, for each source, S1 . . . Sn, I am justified in believing S1
reports p, S2 reports p . . . Sn reports p. According to
foundationalists, these beliefs are justified without being inferred
from any other beliefs; they are basic beliefs. Then, inferring to the
best explanation, I come to believe p. This belief-that-p is a
non-basic belief, but since it rests on basic beliefs, the overall
picture is a foundationalist one, not a coherentist one.
Second, even on standard coherence views, it is not clear that the
reports-that-p cohere with one another. Logical coherence, both in the
sense of logical consistency and in the sense of mutual derivability,
is in place; but the explanatory relations that coherentists so often
emphasize are not.
Third, it is controversial whether the argument is cogent. One issue
here concerns whether each source, taken individually, provides
justification for believing p. If each independently confers some
justification, then one of coherentism's rivals – namely, a version of
foundationalism which says that coherence can boost overall
justification, but cannot generate justification from scratch – can
agree. On the other hand, if each source fails on its own to confer
any justification whatsoever, then the question remains: does this
kind of case show that coherence can create justification from
scratch? If the argument is to establish that coherence is by itself
sufficient to generate justification, we need to take each individual
source as, on its own, providing no justification whatsoever for
believing p. Recently Bayesian proofs have been offered to show that
the convergence of such sources does not increase the probability of p
(see Huemer 1997 and Olson 2005). Their convergence would have been
just as likely had p been false.
b. For Necessity: Only Beliefs can Justify Other Beliefs
The next coherentist argument traces to work by Wilfrid Sellars (1973)
and Donald Davidson (1986). Often this argument is put forth as an
anti-foundationalist argument. However, if successful, it establishes
the stronger positive claim of necessity coherentism. According to
this argument, only beliefs are suited to justify beliefs. As Davidson
puts it, "nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except
another belief" (1986, p.126). Consider the obvious alternative – what
justifies our empirical beliefs about the external world are
perceptual states. But perceptual states are either states that have
propositions as their objects, or they don't. If they have
propositions as their objects, then we need to be aware of these
propositions in the sense that we need to believe these propositions
in order for the initial belief to be justified. But it is these
further beliefs that are really doing the justifying. On the other
hand, if they do not have propositions as objects, then, no logical
relations can hold between their objects and the propositional
contents of the beliefs that they are supposed to justify. That seems
to leave perceptual states standing in only causal relations to the
relevant empirical beliefs. But, Davidson claims, the mere fact that a
belief is caused by a perceptual state implies nothing about whether
that belief is justified.
Foundationalists have replied in a number of ways. First, suppose
perceptual states do not take propositions as their objects. It is not
clear why there needs to be a logical relation between the objects of
perceptual states, and the contents of the beliefs that they are
supposed to justify. Non-perceptual states can figure into statements
of conditional probability, so that on their obtaining, a given belief
is likely to be true to some degree or other. Alternatively, they can
bear explanatory relations to the beliefs that they are alleged to
justify. Second, suppose the relevant perceptual states do take
propositions as their objects. It is not at all obvious that one needs
to be aware of them for them to justify, though perhaps one does need
to be aware of them if one is to show that one's belief is justified.
Here, the coherentist argument is often charged with conflating the
notion of a justified belief with the notion of being in a position to
show that one's belief is justified.
c. For Necessity: The Need for Justified Background Beliefs
Coherentists sometimes argue in the following way. First, they invoke
a prosaic justified belief about the external world – say my present
belief that there is a computer in front of me. Then they claim that
this belief is justified only if I am justified in believing that the
lighting is normal, that my eyes are functioning properly, that no
tricks are being played on me, and so forth. For if I am not justified
in making these assumptions, then my belief that there is a computer
in front of me would not be justified. Generalizing, the claim is that
our beliefs about the external world are justified only if some set of
justified background beliefs is in place.
This argument has also been challenged. The key claim–that my belief
that there is a computer in front of me is justified only if I am
justified in believing these other things–is not obvious. A young
child, for example, might believe there is a computer in front of her,
and this belief might be justified, even though she is not yet
justified in believing anything about the lighting, her visual
processes, and so forth. If this is correct, then the most the
argument can show is that if someone has a justified belief that there
is a computer in front of them and if they believe that the lighting
is normal, that their eyes are functioning well, and so forth, then
these latter beliefs had better be justified. This, however, is
consistent with foundationalism. Moreover, some epistemologists argue
that the psychological realization condition might not be met. For it
is implausible to think that I infer that there is a computer in front
of me from one or more of my beliefs about the lighting, my eyes, and
absence of tricksters. Nor do I infer any of these latter beliefs from
my belief that there is a computer in front of me. Maybe this
non-content requirement will do instead: my computer belief is
counterfactually dependent on my beliefs about the lighting, my eyes,
and so forth, so that if I did not have any of the latter beliefs,
then I would not have the computer belief either. This is far from
obvious, though. Perhaps, in the imagined counterfactual situation, my
state is like the child's. So even a relation of counterfactual
dependence might not be needed.
d. For Necessity: The Need for Meta-Beliefs
There is another argument that begins from a prosaic justified belief
about the external world. Consider, again, my empirically justified
belief that there is a computer in front of me. For this belief to be
justified, I must possess some reason for holding it. But to possess a
reason is to believe that reason. Since the reason presumably needs to
be a good one, I must believe it in such a way that my belief in that
reason is a justified belief. This yields a second justified belief.
This second justified belief can then be subjected to the same
argument, an argument that will yield some third justified belief. And
so on.
Foundationalists have charged that this argument is psychologically
unrealistic. Surely, having a justified belief that there is a
computer in front of me does not require having an infinite number of
justified beliefs. Coherentists have a good reason to avoid being
committed to this kind of result: it is much more psychologically
realistic to posit coherent systems of beliefs that are finite. If
this is right, the argument is best thought of as a reductio ad
absurdum of one, or more, of the claims that lead to the result –
either the claim that justified belief requires possessing a reason,
the claim that possessing a reason requires believing that reason, or
the claim that possessing a reason requires believing it with
justification.
Moreover, this argument does not clearly support coherentism. Instead,
it seems to support infinitism. Plus, the demand that it makes is a
demand for linear justification: my computer belief relies for its
justification on my having a second justified belief; in turn, this
second justified belief relies for its justification on my having some
third justified belief. These dependency relations are asymmetric
one-way relations, the hallmark of linear justification, not coherence
justification.
5. Arguments Against Coherentism
This section takes up five arguments against coherentism. These are in
addition to the circularity and self-support charges that that were
discussed earlier.
a. Against Sufficiency: The Input and Isolation Arguments
One argument against sufficiency coherentism says that it fails to
recognize the indispensable role that experience plays in justifying
our beliefs about the external world. That sufficiency coherentism
gives no essential role to experience follows from the fact that the
states that suffice to justify our beliefs are, on this view, limited
to other beliefs. That this is grounds for rejecting sufficiency
coherentism is spelled out in several different ways. One way appeals
to a lack of connection to the truth: since the view does not give any
essential role to the central source of input from the external world,
namely experience, there is no reason to expect a coherent system of
beliefs to accurately reflect the external world. This line of attack
is often referred to as the isolation objection. Alternatively, an
opponent of sufficiency coherentism might not appeal to
truth-conductivity. Instead, she might simply claim that it is
implausible to deny that part of what justifies my present belief that
there is a computer in front of me is the nature of my present visual
and tactile experiences. So even if my experience is not reflective of
the truth, perhaps because I am a deceived brain-in-a-vat, my
perceptual beliefs will be justified only if they suitably fit with
what my perceptual states are reporting.
Of course, proponents of necessity coherentism are free to impose
other necessary conditions on justified belief, conditions that can
include things about experience. But what about proponents of
sufficiency coherentism? How can they respond? Let's look at three
ways. The first is from Laurence BonJour (1985, chapters 6 and 7).
BonJour identifies a class of beliefs that he calls cognitively
spontaneous beliefs. Roughly, these are non-inferential beliefs that
arise in us in a non-voluntary way. A subset of these beliefs can be
justified from within one's system of beliefs by appeal to two other
beliefs: the belief that these first-order beliefs occur
spontaneously, plus the belief that first-order spontaneous beliefs of
a specific kind (a kind individuated by its characteristic subject
matter, or by its "apparent mode of sensory production") tend to be
true. According to BonJour, invoking cognitively spontaneous beliefs
in this way explains how experience can make a difference to the
justificatory status of our beliefs – experiences do this via their
being reflected in a subset of our beliefs. BonJour contends that in
addition a coherentist must give an account of how experiences must
make a difference to the justification of some of our beliefs. Here,
he introduces the Observation Requirement: roughly, any system of
beliefs that contains empirically justified beliefs must include the
belief that a significant likelihood of truth attaches to a reasonable
variety of cognitively spontaneous beliefs.
Alternatively, Keith Lehrer (see chapter 6 of his 1990 book) calls on
the fact that a human's typical body of beliefs is going to include
beliefs about the conditions under which she reliably forms beliefs.
Lehrer points out that this belief is either true or false. If it is
true, then in tandem with beliefs about the conditions under which one
formed some beliefs, plus the beliefs themselves, the truth of the
beliefs, and their being justified, follows. On the other hand, if a
belief about the conditions under which one reliably forms beliefs is
false, then the justification for the relevant belief is defeated
(this entails that one fails to know, though the belief still enjoys
what Lehrer calls "personal justification").
Third, a coherentist might challenge the assumption that experiences
and beliefs are distinct. On some views of perceptual states (for
example, the view that Armstrong defends in chapter 10 of his 1968
book), perceptual states, or at least a significant class of
perceptual states, involve, and entail, believing. On these views,
when one of the relevant perceptual states supplies input from the
external world, one's corpus of beliefs is provided with input from
the external world. The viability of this response turns on the case
for thinking that perceiving is believing.
b. Against Sufficiency: The Alternative Coherent Systems Argument
A second argument against sufficiency coherentism connects in some
ways with the last argument. According to this second argument, for
each system of coherent beliefs, there are multiple alternative
systems – alternative because they include beliefs with different,
logically incompatible, contents – that are just as coherent. However,
if there are plenty of highly, equally coherent, but incompatible,
systems, and if few of these systems do an adequate job of faithfully
representing reality, then coherentism is not a good indicator of
truth. Since this line of reasoning is readily knowable, beliefs that
coherently fit together are not, at least by virtue of their coherence
alone, justified.
The exact number of alternative systems that are equally coherent
depends on the exact details of what constitutes coherence. But like
most of the standard arguments for, and against, coherentism, the
soundness of this argument is not thought to turn on these details.
Nor is it clear that coherentists can reply by denying the view of
epistemic justification invoked in the argument. Even if one were to
deny the externalist thesis which says that the mark of justified
beliefs is that they are likely to be true, in some objective
non-epistemic sense of "likely," epistemic internalism might not
provide refuge. For BonJour, Lehrer, and other internalists, beliefs
that are not likely, in the same externalist sense, to be true can be
justified: for example, my belief that there is a computer in front of
me would be justified even if I were a lifelong deceived
brain-in-a-vat. But it is not clear that it is reasonable, by
internalist lights, to hold a coherent system of beliefs just because
they are coherent, while it is reasonable to believe that there are
plenty of alternative equally coherent, but incompatible, belief
systems. So, this objection might go through whether one weds
coherentism to epistemic externalism or internalism.
A sufficiency coherentist might try to respond to this argument in the
same way that she responds to the input problem. She might claim, for
example, that a sufficient bulk of a person's beliefs are cognitively
spontaneous beliefs. Since these beliefs are involuntarily acquired,
they will constrain the number, and nature, of alternative equally
coherent systems that one could have. Alternatively, a large bulk of
our beliefs will be firmly in place if perceiving is believing.
c. Against Necessity: Feasibility Problems
Let's turn to some arguments against necessity coherentism. It is
highly plausible that humans have plenty of justified beliefs. So, if
justification requires coherence, it must be psychologically realistic
to think that each of us has coherent systems of beliefs. How
psychologically realistic is this?
Again, the answer depends, in part, on the make up of the coherence
relation. As we saw, coherence at a minimum requires logical
consistency. Christopher Cherniak (see Cherniak 1984) considers using
a truth-table to determine whether a system of 138 beliefs is
logically consistent. If one were so quick that one could check each
line of the truth table for this long conjunction in the time it takes
a light ray to traverse the diameter of a proton, it would still take
more than twenty billion years to work through the entire table. Since
138 beliefs is hardly an inordinate number of beliefs for a system to
have, it appears that coherence cannot be checked for in any humanly
feasible way.
While this sort of consideration might pose a problem for a position
that couples coherentism with internalism (as BonJour and Lehrer do),
coherentism itself does not require a person to verify that it is
logically consistent. It does not even require that a person be able
to verify this. It just requires that the system in fact be logically
consistent. Still, there might be problems in the neighborhood. One is
that Cherniak's point might well imply that we do not form, or
sustain, our beliefs in virtue of their coherence, since any cognitive
mechanism that could do this would need to be much more powerful than
any mechanisms we have. Second, it is highly plausible to think that
we are often in a position to show that our beliefs are justified; but
Cherniak's point suggests that if coherentism were right, this would
often be beyond our abilities.
d. Against Necessity: The Preface Paradox
Another argument questions whether logical inconsistency, an obvious
mark of incoherence, really entails a lack of justification. Imagine
an historian who has just completed her lifelong book project. She has
double and triple checked each claim that she makes in the book, and
each has checked out. For each of the claims she makes, c1, ….. cn,
she has a justified belief that it is true: she has the justified
belief that c1 is true, the justified belief that c2 is true, … , and
the justified belief that cn is true. At the same time, she is fully
aware of the fact that historians make mistakes. In all likelihood,
her book contains at least one mistake. For this reason, she is
justified in believing that at least one of the claims that she makes
in her book is false. But this yields a set of beliefs that is not
logically consistent, since it includes the belief that c1 is true,
the belief that c2 is true, … , the belief that cn is true, and the
belief that at least one of c1 through cn is false. Some
epistemologists, for example, Foley 1992, have argued that the
historian is justified in believing this set of logically inconsistent
claims. And, all of these beliefs remain justified even if she knows
they are logically inconsistent.
In response, the coherentist might appropriate any of a number of
views on this Preface Paradox. For example, John Pollock (1986) has
suggested a simple reason for thinking that the historian's beliefs
cannot be both logically inconsistent and justified. Since a set of
inconsistent propositions logically implies anything whatsoever,
adding a widely accepted principle concerning justification will yield
the result that one can be justified in believing anything whatsoever.
The principle is the closure principle: roughly, it says that if one
is justified in believing some set of propositions and one is
justified in believing that those propositions logically imply some
other proposition, then upon deducing this other proposition from the
set that one starts from, one is justified in believing that
proposition.
A second set of cases involve beliefs that are logically inconsistent,
although this is unknown to the person who holds them. For example,
while Frege had good reason to believe that the axioms of arithmetic
that he came up with were consistent, Russell showed that in fact they
were not consistent. It is quite plausible that Frege's beliefs in
each of the axioms were, though logically inconsistent, nonetheless
justified (see Kornblith 1989). BonJour (1989) responded to this case,
as well as the Preface Paradox, by agreeing that both Frege's, and the
historian's beliefs, are justified. He claimed that logical
consistency is overrated; it is, in fact, not an essential component
of coherence.
e. Against Necessity: Counterexamples
There appear to be straightforward counterexamples to coherentism.
Introspective beliefs constitute an important class of such cases. On
a broad interpretation of "empirical" that encompasses sources of
belief in addition to the sensory modalities (one that contrasts with
the a priori), introspective beliefs count as empirical. Consider,
then, my introspective belief that I am in pain, or my introspective
belief that something looks red to me. These beliefs are not inferred
from any other beliefs – I did not arrive at either of them by
inference from premises. They are not based on any other beliefs.
In response, Lehrer (1990, p. 89) has suggested that a coherentist
might identify one, or more, background beliefs, and claim that,
though the introspective belief is not inferred from these background
belief, the introspective belief is justified because it coheres with
the background beliefs. For example, to handle the introspective
belief that something looks red to me, Lehrer points to the background
belief that if I believe something looks red to me then, unless
something untoward is going on, the best explanation is that there is
something that does look red to me.
It is not clear that this response works. Let R be the proposition
that something looks red to me. Lehrer's suggestion requires that
coherence holds between (i) R and (ii) if I believe R, then R. It is
not clear, though, that coherence does hold between these. Though they
are logically consistent, neither entails the other; moreover, they
need not be inductively related to one another; nor is it clear that
either explains the other.
6. Looking Ahead
Intense discussion of coherentism has been intermittent. Two recent
defenses of the position, Laurence BonJour's 1985 The Structure of
Empirical Knowledge and Keith Lehrer's 1990 version of Knowledge,
significantly advanced the issues and triggered substantial
literatures, which mostly attacked coherentism. But undoubtedly, work
on coherentism has suffered from the fact that so few philosophers are
coherentists. Even BonJour, who did so much to reinvigorate the
discussion, has abandoned coherentism. See his 1999 paper for his
renunciation. With the exception of work being done by Bayesians, few
epistemologists are presently working on coherentism.
Epistemology would be better off if this were not so. For even if
coherentism falls to some objection, it would be nice if we had a
better idea of exactly what range of positions fall. Moreover, when it
comes to the task of clarifying the nature of coherence, an appeal can
be made to many foundationalists. While there might not be much
motivation to develop a position that one rejects, there is this: many
foundationalists want to incorporate considerations about coherence.
As we saw, they usually do this in one of two ways, either by allowing
coherence to boost the level of justification enjoyed by beliefs that
are independently justified in some non-coherentist fashion, or by
stamping incoherent beliefs as unjustified. Defending these conditions
on justification requires clarifying the nature of coherence. So, it
is not just coherentists that have a stake in clarifying coherence.
7. References and Further Reading
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