Providing foundations for coherentism (Q1583759)

The authors bring some simple formal considerations to bear on the discussion of coherentism as a philosophy of knowledge. Coherentists insist on the importance of the internal coherence of a belief system for its justification, minimizing (sometimes to the point of denying) the role of links with an external world. It is sometimes suggested that maximal coherence holds when every belief in the system is supported by its remainder. However, the authors point out that this condition is trivially satisfied by any belief system \(K\), understood as a set of propositions closed under classical consequence, if classical consequence is taken as sufficient for support. For if \(x\in K\) then for any \(y\) we have \(y\vee x\), \(\neg y\vee x\in Cn(K) \setminus \{x\}=K \setminus \{x\}\) so that \(x\in Cn(K\setminus \{x\})\). The lesson drawn by the authors is that if we are to apply a coherence condition such as the above, it should be to a belief base rather than to its closure.